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THE CROSS 
AND THE GARDEN 

Rev. F. W. NORWOOD, d.d. 



THE CROSS 
AND THE GARDEN 

Rev. Efw. NORWOOD, d.d. 

MINISTER OF THE CITY TEMPLE, LONDON 





NEW XS^ YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



7 



.'Hue 



COPYRIGHT, 1922, 
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



/ 



THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN. 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



©C1A683873 

OCT 25 '22 *** 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN ..... 9 

II THE FUNDAMENTAL SACRIFICE 1 9 

III WHAT IS TRUTH? 29 

IV THE THREE CROSSES 43 

V THE INCOMPLETE PASSION $2 

VI THE GOD OF THE LIVING 6l 

VII THE CREDULITY OF INCREDULITY .... 73 

VIII TO ALL NATIONS 84 

IX GOING BEYOND JESUS 96 

X HOW FAITH GROWS 105 

XI GOD IS LIGHT Il6 

XII THINGS THAT WORK TOGETHER .... I29 

XIII THE PLACE OF VISION I4I 

XIV THE ONE THING I54 

XV WANTED : LEADERS FOR THE CROWD ! . v . l68 

xvi "last of all" . . . A - >; >: . , : . 179 



THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 



THE CROSS AND THE 
GARDEN 



THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

TEXT: John 19:41. Now in the place where He was 
crucified there was a garden. 

AND the garden, if they had understood and be- 
lieved its message, made the resurrection inevi- 
table. For the garden was a collection of choice flowers 
that Joseph of Arimathaea had been gathering to- 
gether through the years. It was his dream that some 
day he would sleep in the midst of his garden when 
life's fitful fever should be over. He would lie down 
among the flowers that he had loved so well, not as is 
our horrid custom, enclosed in a wooden box, buried 
deep beneath the sod; but he would repose upon a 
ledge, preserved by the spices of the garden among 
the flowers that he had loved all his life. 

Alas! it had never entered into his dream that the 
serenity of his garden would be broken by the raucous 
shouts of men, that its peace would be invaded with 
pain, that the crimson of his choicest flowers would 
be out-crimsoned by the blood of the most flower-like 
man he had ever seen. 

9 



10 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

For Joseph had never seen a life that reminded him 
so much of the flowers in his garden as the life of 
Jesus of Nazareth. It seemed almost too fair to be 
truly rooted in this murky and miry world. It seemed 
to belong to Heaven rather than to earth, it seemed 
like the promise of what a man ought to be rather 
than the revelation of what a man could really be. 
Joseph had watched this flower-like life through the 
years in silence and reticence but with growing faith 
and devotion. When he saw it trampled down under the 
heels of men, he felt the same indignation, only deeper 
if possible, as if he had seen them trample down his 
flowers beneath their feet. In his indignation he was 
stung out of his reticence; he rushed into the midst of 
the horror and said, — "Let Him lie among my flowers, 
He is more worthy to lie there than I." No one else 
thought of the garden that day but Joseph of Arima- 
thaea who loved it. Long afterwards, when John was 
writing the story he remembered, and his face was lit 
up with a smile as he wrote, — 

"Now in the place where He was crucified there 
was a garden." 

So they laid Jesus in the garden where every flower 
was bearing mute but beautiful witness to the life 
that springs out of death, to the life that shall endless 
be. As the breeze rustled amidst the plants of the 
garden, every flower bowed to its neighbour and 
smiled, saying: — "Man is always a destroyer; he 
tramples us down beneath his feet, he strips our kins- 
folk of their fruits, their nuts, their seeds. He can- 
not live without us though we could live without him. 
He is the life destroyer, we are the life makers. When 



THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 11 

he sees a life that is like a flower he cries, Crucify! 
Crucify! He has not learned our secret yet; we know 
that those beautiful lives like ourselves only die that 
they might live again." When the breeze ceased, and 
the sun was setting and every flower bowed its head 
to slumber, it whispered to itself as it fell asleep, — 
"There will be a resurrection in the morning.' , 

If they had only understood and believed the mean- 
ing of the garden, they would have known that the 
resurrection was inevitable. 

You say that is poetry rather than fact. There 
are some people who seldom see anything beautiful 
in the world and when they do they say, — "It is poetic, 
but not true." "Poetry," said Aristotle long ago, 
"is more philosophic than history and of a higher 
seriousness." Men who crucify never see the garden. 
They look for blood and they find it, for they spill 
it out of its crimson arteries where it colors delicately 
the palpitating skin and splash it like wanton savages 
who over-turn the artist's paint-pot over his exquisitely 
tinted picture, the while they tread the flowers down 
under their heels. There is no garden for men who 
crucify. 

Have you not noticed that the world has no char- 
acter until you give it one? You cannot say whether 
it is love or indifference or even hate, — you give it its 
character. It is a pig-sty for pigs, it is a garden 
^ior those who love flowers. In the end you make 
the world, you give it its character, it answers back 
to what is in your own heart. 

Yesterday I was going through a street in the slums. 
There were half a dozen children in front of me of 



12 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

tender age. Their eyes fell on some innocent word 
on a tradesman's sign, and they twisted it in their 
unclean little minds to make of it something obscene. 
God knows I do not blame the little children ; I rather 
pity them. Those who are blamable are older folk 
who by guilty speech or even by equally guilty silence 
allow such thoughts to germinate in minds which ought 
to be pure. I could blame also some hoary old cus- 
toms and social conditions which make such things pos- 
sible and almost inevitable for children. It sent a 
shudder through me to notice that the minds of chil- 
dren could make a pigsty of the world. I thought 
of what the Poet, T. E. Brown, said: — i 

"Between our folding lips 

God interposing, slips 

An embryo life, — and goes; 

And this becomes your rose. 

We love, God makes : in our sweet mirth 

God spies occasion for a birth. 

Then is it His, or is it ours ? 

I know not — He is fond of flowers." 

The one is poetry, the other is fact. To some 
minds the only facts are those which are covered 
with slime. The world is what you make it; it is a 
garden for those who have flowers within their souls: 
it is a jungle for those who have wild beasts therein. 

Man made the cross, God made the garden ; they did 
not see the garden but it was there all the time. 
John remembered half a century later writing it down 
in the imperishable record, — 

"In the place where He was crucified there was a 
garden." 



THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 13 

For the garden is older than the cross. Plants were 
the first living things that God made. There could 
be no life until there were plants, for plants are the 
only things in this world that can create living material. 
All animals, including man himself destroy life, plants 
make it. Somewhere back in the long ages there was a 
period when there was no living thing. Something had 
been flung out of the flaming bosom of the sun, 
seething in its heat but gradually cooling, and there 
was no living thing. If that had been all there was, 
you could have told then if you had been there, and 
had been wise enough, all that would be in the world to- 
day; but somehow and somewhere there came into the 
midst of things a principle of life and plants began to 
grow. Nobody knows how it happened, nobody can 
tell even yet, but the plants made life out of death, 
gave to the world something which had not visibly 
existed before, — shall we say, created it? Oh, well, 
I do not know, who knows? I suppose it was there 
somewhere in the very beginning, potentially All that 
was to come was there but it had not crossed the 
r bridge from the inorganic to the organic until it 
crossed in the mystery of plant life. The first begin- 
ning of a garden made the world a home; the first 
development that made for growth of any kind or 
opened up any door of possibility, was in essence a 
resurrection, life out of the dead. 

There is not a flower anywhere that does not speak 
of the resurrection. It is surely not harder to believe 
that Jesus rose from the dead, than it is, if you truly 
understand the nature of the problem, to believe what 
you know is true, that plants brought life into being 



14 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

out of a dead world. Long before the cross a miracle 
had been accomplished and the world was all aglow 
with the dandelions, the daisies, the buttercups, 
and all the beauteous flowers which you scarce can say 
are alive and yet you know are not dead. 

Jesus said, "Consider the lilies, how they grow." 
If we kept near the lilies we would be better men and 
women. If we kept near the lilies we would not 
crucify. Men only crucify when they do not see the 
flowers. You cannot take in in one sweep of vision 
a lily and a cross. When you want a cross you do 
not see the lily; when the cross is a hideous fact you 
know the lily is greater. Man can destroy, only God 
can create. 

Why do we not dare to judge life more by its 
flowers than by its slime ? There was a significant ar- 
ticle in one of the newspapers this week from the pen 
of Dean Inge. It has gladdened my heart because it 
came at last to this point, that the supreme line of argu- 
ment for the life beyond is the line of your affections. 
Love is the supreme argument after all for the con- 
tinuity of life. There is nothing destroyed in this 
world, every school boy knows that. Things go back 
to their primal elements, they are used up again and 
again in all manner of ways. You lose track of them. 
That which was once part of a flower may become part 
of a Cathedral next, you do not know where it comes 
from, you do not know where it is going to, but it has 
not lost its identity though you can no longer identify 
it; you speak of it as the conservation of energy. 

But where does love go? You cannot split that up, 
it is not love if it loses its personal connection, it has 



THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 15 

gone, the fairest thing, the most beautiful thing has 
eluded you. Do not mock me by speaking of the 
conservation of energy, or say that nothing is lost. I 
tell you that love is lost if personality is lost; so is 
reverence, and so is religion, — true religion. Your i 

j flowers are either your greatest mockery or God's 

Vgreatest prophecy. 

To me there is a whole world of theology in that 
one word which Jesus spoke to the weeping woman, — 
"Mary!" She was weeping so copiously, her heart 
was so broken that nothing comforted her. The empty 
tomb instead of being all athrob with hope was only 
vacant with despair. Even two angels, sitting one 
where the head and the other where the feet of Jesus 
had lain did not break through her grief or touch her 
imagination. Even Jesus Himself standing outside 
and speaking to her could not at first break through 
the crust of her despair. There was no argument that 
any school-man could have propounded that would 
have touched her; she was walled up in grief, and 
broken in despair. 

And Jesus said, — "Mary!" In that word there was 
affection, the affection of a great true soul, a soul 
that loved her soul. And in that word there was 
reverence, the thing that Mary had lacked. God 
knows she had beauty and charm which brought her 
troops of admirers, but no reverence. She was the 
play-thing of others, she was their scorn. Nobody for 
years, but Jesus, had ever used her name in tones of 
reverence; He had always touched the deepest chords 
within her heart; He had made her believe that though 
she had been trampled in the soil her soul was yet a 



16 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

flower, and she saw that beauteous vision again at that 
moment. 

In that word there was religion, for He who spoke it 
stood to her for God and all the best she knew about 
God; and when that one word pierced her conscious- 
ness again, touched her heart afresh, religion was re- 
vived in the soul of Mary Magdalene. There is a 
whole world of theology in that one word; it means 
that God, reverence and affection are eternal in their 
essence, death has no power over them. 

Let us judge life by its flowers rather than by its 
crosses. Near every cross there is a garden if we 
would look for it. Many of us know that we pluck 
the choicest flowers at the foot of our crosses. Many 
of us know that it is the evil power of men which 
in the main makes the crosses, but it is the vibrant, 
unobtrusive, ever pulsating power of God which makes 
the flowers. 

For my part I dare to value life by its gardens 
rather than by its crosses. I would strive to do so even 
though faith faltered, though my theories fell like 
birds that were broken-winged, though every man in 
the world doubted the faith, the faith of the risen 
Christ ; for my part I would try to believe in the gar- 
dens, I would try to believe in the flowers. If there 
could be a God whose character could not be har- 
monised with the flowers then I would have nought to 
do with Him, I could not worship Him, I would even 
defy Him. 

Believe in the flowers! I believe that beauty is an 
emanation from the divine. I am very conscious of 
the crosses, as you are. The cross is never so terrible 



THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 17 

as it is to the man who sees it with the flowers in the 
fore-ground. It is easy for the brutal who only see red, 
to tolerate the cross. It is the artistic and poetic souls 
who quiver and quail in the presence of the cross, 
though even they believe through, and see in it at last 
a radiance and a beauty that others have not seen. 

So long as there is a single flower blooming man 
should believe in God. One lily is enough to make 
a man believe in life after death. The flowers at the 
foot of the cross bear witness to the throbbing, patient 
power of God and the irresistible omnipotence of the 
Christ who was crucified. Flowers are the prophets 
of the world beyond, the heralds who declare that the 
good is never lost. 

You remember perhaps those words of Brown- 
ing's :— 

"There shall never be one lost good ! What was shall 

live as before. 
The evil is null, is naught, is silence implying sound; 
What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much 

good more; 
On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven a perfect 

round. 

"All we have willed, or hoped, or dreamed of good shall 

exist ; 
Not in semblance, but itself; no beauty or good or 

power, 
Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the 

melodist 
When eternity affirms the. conception of an hour. 

"The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth 
too hard, 



18 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the 

sky, 
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard ; 
Enough that He heard it once : we shall hear it bye and 

bye." 



II 

THE FUNDAMENTAL SACRIFICE 

TEXT : Revelation 13 :8. The Lamb slain from the foun- 
dation of the world. 

IN those few words, infinity seems to be flung into 
a phrase. It is a strange book, this book called 
the Revelation of St. John. In our time one has a 
feeling that it is scarcely worth while to try and ex- 
plain in detail its symbolism, it is so oriental, so 
highly coloured, so remote from our ordinary western 
thinking. 

The experience of commentators through long cen- 
turies has shown how impossible it is to reach una- 
nimity in our interpretations of this book. So much 
that was poignantly present or imminently impending 
to the writer has passed into the distance for us and 
it is only with difficulty that we may re-discover it. 
Opinions differ as to whether the meaning of the book 
is entirely in the past or whether it is not even yet 
mainly in the future. Amidst these contending views, 
choleric argumentative people continually quarrel 
about the book, and lethargic people consistently neg- 
lect it and so both become losers, for it is a great 

19 



20 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

and wonderful book with a singular faculty as I have 
said for flinging infinity into a mere phrase. 

Nobody can read it through, even though they feel 
they do not understand it but they will carry away 
with them sentences they will never forget ; great sen- 
tences which are like searchlights throwing light upon 
some of earth's most intricate problems. Here in this 
passage before us is one of those phrases : — 

"The Lamb, slain from the foundation of the 
world. ,, 

Nobody can forget that, nobody has forgotten. For 
all these centuries it has laid hold upon the imagina- 
tion of Christian men. It is of course possible, and 
it is only right that I should point out to you that 
there are two ways of rendering this passage; it is 
largely a matter of punctuation. You may read it 
as though that phrase, "from the foundation of the 
world" belonged to the book in which the names of 
the elect were written or you may read it so that it 
belongs to the Lamb that was slain. But after all, 
to hesitate seems mere pedantry. We know that the 
Christian imagination laid hold of that thought of a 
fundamental sacrifice in the first generation. You re- 
member how Peter says: — 

"The precious blood of Christ, as of a Lamb with- 
out blemish and without spot: who verily was fore- 
ordained before the foundation of the world, but was 
manifest in these last times for you." 

You can recall many passages in the Epistles of St. 
Paul which carry the thought concerning Jesus the 



THE FUNDAMENTAL SACRIFICE 21 

Christ back, back to the very beginning of things, 
back to the very heart and will of the Eternal. You 
cannot doubt that in the first generation the Chris- 
tian mind seized upon this thought concerning the 
Christ, and in all the generations which have succeeded, 
the experience of men has been responding to it. 

When you come to consider the life of Jesus of 
Nazareth as you consider most other people's lives, 
you wonder what there can have been about it which 
so took hold of men and so fastened itself upon the 
imagination of the world. If you have been to the 
East and have yourself trodden over those sacred 
spots, or if you have merely gazed at pictures of 
Jerusalem, the Mount of Olives, the Garden of 
Gethsemane, and perceived the comparative insignifi- 
cance of these localities, the crudity of so many things 
that still persist in that locality, you find the thought 
coming into your mind, "How did it happen that a 
life lived amid such mean surroundings, in such a 
remote corner of the earth, at such a far distant time 
should have so taken hold of mankind as to become 
the central thing in history, in thought, in morals and 
in religion? Do you realise that there were probably 
not so many people who saw Jesus of Nazareth in the 
flesh as there were who saw the boat-race yesterday? 
It was only a brief life, very simple in its habits, very 
unostentatious in its methods, very clear and true ill 
its character, a brief life blotted out suddenly in shame. 
How was it? Let history tell us, for it is a prob- 
lem which falls to it to explain. 

Surely it must be, as the Christian imagination saw 
almost from the first, that there were implications 



22 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

in that life and in that death that go right back to 
the foundation of the world. That is what men of in- 
spired intuition saw in the first generation, that is 
what men have been working out for nineteen cen- 
turies at least, and I venture to say will continue to 
work out so long as man endures. 

Here in the heart of it is this comparison of Jesus 
Christ with the Lamb. Why, there is something that 
goes back to the foundation of things. There has 
always been something in the world which corre- 
sponded to the lamb, just as there has always been 
something in the world which found its appropriate 
symbol in the lion or the tiger. You cannot go out 
and look about you in this wonderful world of God's 
but you feel those two powers continually present, the 
power of the lion and the power of the lamb. When 
Nature smiles upon you and the sun shines, when 
the gentle rain falls bringing forth the harvest, when 
the great sea hushes itself and becomes like glass, you 
think of that marvellous gentleness that pulses through 
the world of which the lamb might seem to be the 
symbol. Ay, but to-morrow there will be not sun- 
shine but storm, there will be not the green fertile 
meadows but the drought and the famine and the hur- 
ricane. You will marvel then at the power there is in 
the world which is ruthless, fierce and cruel as a lion 
or a tiger. 

Away in Australia once, far away in the remoter 
parts where the drought sometimes comes and stays 
for months and even years, a minister of the Gospel 
came to the home of a settler and said to him as 
he met him on the verandah, "I have come to offer 



THE FUNDAMENTAL SACRIFICE 23 

prayer with you for the breaking* of the drought." 
And the man said, — "Listen" — and as they listened they 
heard the poor sheep pitifully bleating, and the cattle 
gasping in the heat, and the man said, "If that prayer 
is not reaching Heaven do you think yours would?" 
Have we not looked upon Nature when she seemed 
the crudest thing conceivable? 

You remember those words of William Blake, who 
chose not the lion as the symbol of the more cruel as- 
pect of nature but the tiger. The tiger was not known 
to the writers of the Bible or doubtless they would 
have fixed upon him rather than the lion as the emblem 
of the fierceness which is in things. In this strange 
chapter from which I have quoted you get the 
apocalyptic vision of evil as coming out of the sea 
in the form of a beast part leopard, part lion, part 
bear: — "The beast which I saw was like unto a 
leopard" (swift springing force) "and his feet were 
as the feet of a bear," (dull brutal force) "and his 
mouth as the mouth of a lion" (strong, indomitable, 
fierce). William Blake has the same vision as he 
writes these words : — 

"Tiger, tiger burning bright 
In the forests of the night, 
What immortal hand or eye 
Could frame thy fearful symmetry? 

"In what distant deep or skies 
Burnt the fire of thine eyes? 
On what wings dare he aspire? 
What the hand dare seize the fire? 



24, THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

"And what shoulders and what art 
Could twist the sinews of thy heart? 
And when thy heart began to beat, 
What dread hands and what dread feet; 

"What the hammer, what the chain ? 
In what furnace was thy brain? 
What the anvil? What dread grasp 
Dare its deadly terrors clasp? 

"When the stars threw down their spears, 
And watered heaven with their tears, 
Did He smile His work to see? 
Did He who made the lamb make thee? 

"Tiger, tiger burning bright 
In the forests of the night, 
What immortal hand or eye 
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry ?" 

Expound it how you will, they go back to the 
foundation of things, the tiger and the lamb. No 
wonder that religious thought chose as the symbol for 
the expression of its deepest feeling, the lamb; no 
wonder that in the Old Testament literature you meet 
again and again, the lamb. You remember how cen- 
tral a place it occupied in the ritual of the Jewish peo- 
ple, how familiar a sight it was to see a lamb being 
taken away to the Temple to be offered as a sacrifice 
for the sins of the people. Religious thought was 
instinctively right. You could not imagine it choosing 
the lion or the tiger as the symbol of its worship. That 
lowly feeling of dependence upon the infinite; that 
tender searching of the conscience, of repentance and 
prayer could find no more appropriate symbol where- 



THE FUNDAMENTAL SACRIFICE 25 

with to express itself than the symbol «of the lamb. 
You remember when John the Baptist in a moment 
of inspiration looked upon Jesus of Nazareth, he 
said, — "Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the 
sins of the world." No one can think of the. life that 
He lived, of the death that He died without feeling 
that the lamb was the true expression of His character, 
of His attitude towards God and man. 

Right down the Christian centuries you know what 
a great place in its symbolism and its imagery the 
lamb has played It is a symbol of weakness, of de- 
pendence, of sacrifice. 

But I think we have over-stressed the passivity of 
the sacrifice of the lamb. When I read this wonder- 
ful book we call the Revelation, I notice that the lamb 
is spoken of twenty-seven times. But when I have 
finished reading the book the impression that is left 
upon my mind is not the passive sacrifice, but the 
strength of the lamb. It is stronger than the lion. It 
is the conqueror of the leopard and the bear. The 
lamb as it had been slain is seen in the centre, and the 
voice that cries that none is worthy to open the book 
save the lamb. The victorious saints "overcame by the 
blood of the lamb." It is the victory of the lamb that 
the book proclaims, it is with the marriage of the lamb 
that the book closes. 

Have we not misunderstood our Lord very largely 
when we have considered that His contribution was 
the contribution of sacrifice only? Did Christ lift 
the world simply because He lay down to be trampled 
upon? No! He lifted the world because about His 
gentleness there was a strength that was greater than 



26 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

the strength of the lion. When He hung upon that 
Cross with drooping head, with the blood trickling 
from His thorn-crowned brow He was not the weakest 
in that multitude, He was the strongest. The very 
Roman soldiers at the foot of the cross bowed before 
Him; they who had spat in His face went away smit- 
ing their breasts, confessing their sin. There is a 
strength about gentleness which is greater than the 
strength of the lion. Right does not conquer wrong 
merely by lying down to be trodden upon. Right 
wins over wrong by refusing to take the same weapons 
that wrong uses, because you cannot beat the beast in 
the beast's own way without becoming a beast. You 
will not conquer the lion upon his own ground, except 
as you become fiercer than the lion. If you would out- 
do the tiger in fierceness you must become worse than 
the tiger. That is what we have been proving these t 
last few years. How did we overcome the ruthless 
nation which sprang upon the world with the sudden- 
ness of the leopard, the dull brutality of the bear, the 
remorselessness of the lion? Alas in those unprepared 
moments we had no other means than to outbeast 
the beast. So we won what we call the victory, 
but we are beginning to discover that it was not the 
victory, it was only a tilt upward of the see-saw. 
The victory has still to be won, and we shall not win 
it until we win in the spirit of the lamb. 

We have not yet begun or have scarcely begun to 
discover the strength of character. It has only just 
begun to dawn upon us that there are resources of 
power in the spirit of the lamb which are infinitely 
mightier than the spirit of the lion. We have scarcely 



THE FUNDAMENTAL SACRIFICE 27 

as yet begun to attempt to solve our problems by jus- 
tice, and reason and law. We have said that the swift- 
ness of the leopard or the deadly brutality of the bear, 
or the ruthless strength of the lion were symbols of a 
nation's greatness, yet all the time history proclaims 
with manifold voices that the nations which grow in 
power are after all the nations that serve, the nations 
that manifest patience and generosity. It is the vic- 
tory of the lamb that is the only victory over the beast. 
It has taken us a long while to learn it, but we 
shall have to learn it in time or our children will have 
to learn it after us. The only way upward is the way 
of character, character that is strong within itself but 
gentle in its expression, which finds its ideal in service 
rather than in domination. The "Lamb slain from the 
foundation of the world" has taken hold of the world 
for that very reason, because of His power to go down 
to the roots of things. You cannot dislodge Jesus 
Christ from His central place in the history of the 
world because all the time He is bearing witness to 
those great and holy truths which as yet mankind has 
only seen dimly and afar ofr*. 

This is but one facet of that marvellous flashing 
jewel, the Cross. One feels ashamed to have spoken 
of the Cross and have said so little. You cannot ex- 
haust its meaning. The Cross is like a great cut 
diamond with a myriad of facets upon which the light 
flashes from every angle. Let us try and catch this 
one beam of light this morning, that true strength 
is lamb-like in character. The tiger is only overcome 
in the end by that superior strength which looks into 
its eyes and quells its savageness. Sin, injustice, social 



28 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

tangles, international quarrels are not solved in the 
end by the swift springing of the leopard, the slow 
brutality of the bear, or the relentless ferocity of the 
lion, but by the meekness which is anything but weak- 
ness and the capacity to receive and interpret that 
divine lamb-like spirit which endures from the founda- 
tion of the world and was manifested in Him whom 
we gladly own as Lord. 



Ill 

WHAT IS TRUTH? 

TEXT: John 18:37. Pilate therefore said unto Him, Art 
Thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that 
I am a king. To this end have I been born, and to this 
end came I into the world, that I should bear witness 
unto the truth. Everyone that is of the truth heareth 
My voice ! Pilate saith unto Him, What is truth ? 

THE men who wrote the Gospel stories did not 
write as dramatists would have written. They 
scarcely seemed conscious of their audience ; there is no 
perceptible striving after effect; there is no massing 
of events to reach a great climax; there is little or no 
use of emotional words. 

About this strange reticence there is doubtless a 
divine wisdom, for nothing palls upon us more than a 
stereotyped scene or dramatised emotion. Every man 
must paint his own picture and try to see these great 
things that happened so long ago. And this is how it 
seems to me it came to pass that Jesus said to Pilate : 

"Every one that is of the truth heareth My voice/' 
and "Pilate said unto Him, 'What is truth?' " 

Pontius Pilate had been wakened up in the early 
hours of the morning, just about cock-crow, and had 
gone reluctantly out to deal with the angry mob which 
surged about his palace steps, for they were led by 

29 



SO THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

men whose hostility he knew and whose power he 
feared. 

He was in a sullen and angry mood. He disliked 
this Jewish people, over whom Caesar had sent him to 
rule. They were the most turbulent race of which he 
had any experience. There was something about 
them which baffled and irritated him. The most am- 
bitious, the most restless of all the nations with which 
he had come in contact in his campaigns, they were yet 
the most religious. 

Pilate had a Roman soldier's contempt for religion. 
It is true he was superstitious ; some unexpected event, 
some omen, a dream, the pronouncement of some 
oracle., could cause him to tremble, but as for religion 
— had he not seen hundreds of them? He had been 
in Egypt and Persia, through Asia Minor and in the 
Balkans — had seen hundreds of different forms of re- 
ligion, and all seemed much alike. With all their 
prayers and mystic rites, none of these peoples had 
been able to stand up against the Roman legions. As 
for him, give him a legion of hardy veterans, shining 
armour, flashing spears, trusty swords, and a fig for 
all the religions in the world! 

Yet these Jewish people baffled him, irritated him. 
He had tried putting them down by force, he had 
ridden rough-shod over their prejudices, but, so surely 
as he touched their religion, they rose against him, 
defenceless as sheep, but angry as wolves. It was all 
so illogical and absurd. 

He looked at them now. It was like their bigotry, 
that they would not so much as set foot within the 
palace, because, forsooth, they counted it unclean, as a 



WHAT IS TRUTH? 31 

court of the Gentiles, — they, the members of a subject 
race, were yet so arrogant as to regard Caesar's Pre- 
torium as an unclean thing. Nothing would do but 
that he, their Governor, must go out to them, taking 
no notice of their insult, and speak to them from the 
marble pavement. Verily it would have pleased him 
better to have sent a file of soldiers to clear them away 
from the place, but experience had taught him that 
it was better to swallow a great deal of insult from 
the Jews than to stir up their passions. 

Therefore Pontius Pilate had gone out to them, and 
one glance was enough to show him that all this com- 
motion concentrated in one solitary Man, whom they 
had thrust forward. Pilate's first impression was that 
He was perfectly harmless. He looked at Him with 
the eyes of a trained soldier; he looked first for sign of 
weapons. There was none. He was dressed in a 
simple white robe, open at the neck, and somewhat 
dishevelled with rough handling. His hands were se- 
curely bound behind His back. He looked for con- 
federates. There were none. Every face was dis- 
torted with passion and set against the prisoner. Pilate 
shrugged his shoulders. A mouse in the talons of an 
eagle was not more helpless than this Man. 

Such things had happened before, and had nothing 
to do with him. "What accusation bring ye against 
this Man?" said he. 

He knew that they did not like him. There was 
a secret hostility always in their hearts ready to be 
manifested against him; they would as soon have his 
life as anybody's, and their reply was like a snarl, as 



32 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

it came back, — "If He were not an evil-doer, we 
should not have delivered Him up unto thee." 

Once more Pilate looked at the Man. An evil-doer ? 
He knew in an instant, for he was a trained observer 
of men, that this Prisoner would not have harmed a 
child, the honour of a woman would have been safe 
with Him, the wealth of the Indies would have passed 
through His hands undiminished. It was a pity to 
see Him in the clutches of this mob, — but then, — it 
had nothing to do with him. 

"Take Him away," he said, turning to go back into 
the palace ; "take Him away and deal with Him accord- 
ing to your own law." 

Their answer caused him to turn back again and 
face them. They said, "It is not lawful for us to put 
any man to death." 

Ah, so that was what they wanted. Their looks be- 
tokened it surely enough. The blood-lust was in their 
eyes; they seemed to show their fangs as wolves do. 
He knew now why they had troubled him, — not out of 
personal respect, but merely to save legal consequences. 
They would make a convenience of his rank and official 
position, but woe be to him if he thwarted their de- 
sires. It was known to some among them, as it was 
known to himself, that his favour with Caesar was 
very insecure. It was not easy to set this Man free. 

Once more his eyes rested upon the Prisoner. His 
was the only calm face amid that seething sea of faces. 
And what a face it was. There was that about it which 
forbade Pilate to send Him to death, as he had sent 
many another in his time. He could not for the life 
of him act with his usual arrogance that day. 



WHAT IS TRUTH? 33 

There came to Pilate an instinctive desire to get 
away from the madding crowd, and, unhampered by 
their prejudices and clamours, to be alone with this 
Man and speak with Him face to face. 

He entered again into his palace and sat down upon 
the dais in the seat of authority. He gave command 
that the Prisoner should appear before him. Quietly 
and with stately mien, Jesus moved to a position in 
front of the powerful Roman, and turned His deep 
and beautiful eyes full upon him. Outside, the impa- 
tient murmuring of the cruel crowd continued, and the 
sound was wafted into the Judgment Hall. 

Pontius Pilate sat in his richly gilded chair of office, 
looking moodily at the white-robed figure of the Man 
who stood before him. 

Around him were the marks of luxury and refine- 
ment. Costly tapestries hung before the walls, statu- 
ary adorned the apartment, his feet rested upon a rich 
rug that lay upon the polished floor. 

He rested his chin in the palm of his hand, and 
looked into the face of the Prophet of Galilee. 

For a moment there was silence; then Pilate's in- 
voluntary question surprised even himself : — 

"Art Thou the King of the Jews?" 

A faint smile came over the face of Jesus, as He 
said : — 

"Sayest thou this of thyself, or did others tell it 
thee concerning Me ?" 

It was the first time Pilate had heard His voice. 
Pilate was angry. The question seemed to him to 



$4, THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

suggest that he had lowered his dignity enough to ex- 
change opinions with that crowd outside. It was the 
Prisoner's own deportment that had made him asso- 
ciate the thought of kingliness with Him. 

<f Am I a Jew?" he asked contemptuously; "Thine 
own nation and the chief priests delivered Thee unto 
me: 'What hast Thou done?' " 

There was a far-away look in the eyes of Christ, 
as if He were seeing into the far distances. At the 
base of His consciousness He heard the baying of 
the crowd that was thirsting for His blood, but His 
great soul was seeing "the joy that was set before 
Him," and His voice was musical and quiet as He 
said : — 

"My kingdom is not of this world : if My kingdom 
were of this world, then would My servants fight, that 
I should not be delivered to the Jews : but now is My 
kingdom not from hence." 

A strange feeling of awe came over Pontius Pilate. 
He felt as he had felt in the presence of Tiberius, 
save for that dishevelled robe, the bound hands of the 
Prisoner, and that angry murmur of voices outside. 
It would not have seemed unnatural to have made an 
obeisance ; then he said : — 

"Art Thou a king then?" 

And the deep eyes of Jesus rested upon him, as He 
answered in calm musical tones : — 

"Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end have 
I been born and to this end came I into the world. 



WHAT IS TRUTH? 35 

that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one 
that is of the truth heareth My voice." 

Pontius Pilate was looking into the eyes of the 
Christ, in the hush of that room, with a strange feel- 
ing about his heart he had not been conscious of be- 
fore. He could not see what Jesus saw, for he was 
of the earth earthy. All his life long his passion had 
been for temporal power, for military power, for all 
the pomp and circumstance of official might. A rich 
palace, a sumptuous table, the command of armies; 
these were the breath 'of life to him. That which was 
only subordinate in the consciousness of the Master 
was very real to him. That crowd outside, with its 
implacable leaders, with its secret knowledge concern- 
ing his past, and its scarcely veiled threats of revenge. 
That was truth to Pontius Pilate. 

And yet he could not withhold the homage of his 
soul from the Man who stood before him. He was im- 
pressed with a sense of spiritual realities, as he looked 
upon Him. He felt vaguely that this Prisoner had 
the truth of things. He could feel the attraction of 
this Man's splendour of character; he was not dead to 
moral appeal. But there was an appeal that was more 
forceful, more loud, more terrible. It was the appeal 
that came murmuring through the closed doors. There 
was that crowd outside. The thing that was remote to 
Jesus at that moment was the uppermost thing with 
Pontius Pilate, — that angry blood-thirsty crowd, seeth- 
ing at the base of the palace steps. What is kingship, 
if these are its subjects? What is truth, high spiritual 
truth, if force thus gives it the blatant lie? 



36 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

Pontius Pilate, torn between the two feelings, 
shrugged his shoulders and said, — "What is truth?" 

Two things kindle my imagination in connection 
with this incident. The first is that Jesus and Pilate 
were alone. Pilate had yielded to an instinctive feel- 
ing he had not analysed, when, instead of sweeping 
away this Prisoner with one wave of the hand, he 
had felt he must bring Him away from that seething 
crowd into the silence of the Hall of Judgment. 

It is the miracle of Jesus, that He is alone with 
people. It is the testimony of men all down the ages 
that, somehow, Jesus Christ has a way of coming in 
from the crowd, Himself unique, alone, and finding a 
man when he too is alone. 

And now what is truth ? This is the question which 
has awakened the imagination of multitudes who have 
read this story. It chimes in with that restless seeking 
for that which corresponds with fact or reality, which 
seems to be life's keenest quest. 

They had both used the word Truth. They were 
both truthseekers ; they were both what Carlyle would 
have called "Sons of Fact." Pontius Pilate was a son 
of fact. When he utters those words, "What is truth," 
they seem to me to be autobiographical. One wants 
to know more about this man; one would like to hear 
the story of his life. There is something wistful about 
this saying; its very cynicism arouses your sympathy. 
You wonder through what he had passed before he 
could say that word with that curl of the lip. You 
seem to see him again as he used to be when he was 
a boy, when ideals soared before his mind and charmed 
his vision, and his untried soul went out purely to 



WHAT IS TRUTH? 37 

wrestle with the world. Pontius Pilate's life had been 
passed in camps and in courts. He was a son of fact, 
keen, observant, critical. He had seen how things 
were done, how power and influence had triumphed 
over merit and truth ; he had seen it, he knew it was so ; 
and slowly he had surrendered to it, and now he was 
a son of fact. There was the crowd outside; there 
were the chief priests and other bitter implacable lead- 
ers. There were the subtle influences that would find 
their way to Caesar's throne; there was something 
that would pluck him from his place and fling him 
down; it was fact; he knew it was fact. 

Yet he could feel the power of the truth that Christ 
represented, and, if I mistake not, Christ was sorry for 
him. 

"I find no fault in Him." That was his spontaneous 
verdict. 

Sad that his deepest conviction should be in such ir- 
revocable conflict with that blatant fact outside. What 
was the use of the innocence of this Man, when cruel 
power was at the door ? Pilate shrugged his shoulders, 
therefore, and said, "I cannot help it; I am not respon- 
sible; I am sorry for the Man, but I must yield to 
the facts." 

So he went out and faced the mob, and said these 
contradictory things : — * 

" T find no fault in Him at all/ and (in hope of a 
weak compromise) 'Ye have a custom that I should 
release unto you one at the Passover; will ye therefore 
that I release unto you the King of the Jews ?' but they 
cried out, 'Not this Man, but Barabbas.' " 



38 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

And, when that feeble subterfuge failed, Pilate sur- 
rendered to the truth as he saw it and said : — 

"Take Him away and crucify Him." 

And Jesus was a Son of Truth. One knows not 
how to speak of Him with sufficient reverence. There 
is a mystery about Him which forbids any attempt at 
close analysis. We know not whence came that full- 
orbed vision of things which made His life so har- 
monious, but we do see that all His life long He was 
using His own eyes, thinking His own thoughts, mak- 
ing His own discoveries and, by His will and His per- 
sonal power, bringing Himself into harmony with 
them. 

And Jesus was a Son of Fact, too. He had looked 
calmly into the heart of life, and He dared to believe 
that the ultimate fact was a fact that should be recon- 
ciled with all things. He could not tolerate a fact of 
the intellect that was in conflict with the fact of the 
emotion. He could not tolerate a fact of the emotion 
that was not in harmony with the fact of the will. He 
had found His way through ; it had been given to Him 
to see His way through ; I know not how. He believed 
that, in the end, intellect and heart and will were to be 
reconciled; He saw life whole and braced Himself to 
it. To Him such facts as that of the crowd outside 
were but passing waves on the bosom of the great sea; 
they were not ultimate ; they were not permanent. To 
Him the cross, with its shame and its anguish, was a 
far less repulsive thing than a lie. 

To Him man was less than God. Jesus was a Son 



WHAT IS TRUTH? 39 

of Fact; Pilate was a son of fact; they looked each 
other in the eye ; and it seems to me that they have been 
doing that ever since. It seems to me also that about 
the main thing in life is to decide whose side you are 
on, — the side of Pilate or the side of Christ. It may 
be that a great part of our salvation consists in the 
seeing of these things, quite apart from the doing of 
them. For every man knows how difficult it is to 
hold on to the truth, as Christ saw it, in the midst of 
a life so full of blatant facts that contradict it. No 
sophistry can reconcile these two things; no preacher 
can charm away the facts of every-day life that have 
always contradicted the essential things of Christianity. 
That is just the centre of the conflict of life and, 
maybe, the ultimate thing is whether a man hauls down 
his flag before life's crude facts or whether he holds 
on in the midst of the conflict to the vision that Christ 
saw. 

Pontius Pilate went out to the crowd, and the crowd 
swallowed him up. The world would never have heard 
of him again, if he had not once been alone in that 
room with Jesus. No man has ever appealed to him 
since for help or for succour. Pontius Pilate swayed 
over to the blatant facts of force and sin, and was 
engulfed by them. 

Jesus Christ stood aloof from the crowd, and has 
been aloof ever since. Unique, alone, with that strange 
divine power which enables Him to go, as it were, 
into the secrets of men's lives with an appeal they can- 
not forget and they do not want to resist. 

It is Jesus Christ who draws near to you when you 
are fighting your hardest fight. It is from Him there 



40 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

comes inspiration and the strength to hold on, when 
the tide is setting against you. It is that kind of thing 
that makes it true when He said: 

"Every one that is of the truth heareth My voice." 

That does not mean that you must count heads and 
see how many there are who call themselves Christians. 
Every time you or I stand for the thing that is noblest 
and best, we are in touch with Jesus Christ, and we 
know it. That is why the world can never forget Him ; 
never get rid of Him. That is why He keeps hold of 
us as a race, in spite of our sins and our follies. One 
moral blemish with Him, and His power would have 
been broken; Jesus Christ, in His very loneliness, 
achieved His Empire. 

No man who knows life, knows it truly, ever wants 
to speak as if he were a close follower of Jesus Christ. 
One reason of that change in our religious life that 
makes men so reticent about their faith is an increasing 
sincerity. Men cannot use now so glibly as our fathers 
did the great words of affirmation. Men who know 
what life is are slow to confess that they are Christians. 
It is not so with other religions. We do not find it 
so with Mohammedanism; every Mussulman will con- 
fess himself a follower of Mahomet, spread his pray- 
ing-mat, and go down in the market-place and say his 
prayers to Allah. It looks very impressive, but it is 
not so impressive, after all, as that clearer perception 
of the truth of things that makes us most reticent con- 
cerning our discipleship and our faith in Jesus Christ. 

But Jesus Christ can come where, I imagine, Ma- 



WHAT IS TRUTH? 41 

hornet never comes. He can come into the secret cham- 
ber of a man's soul just when the temptation is bitter- 
est or the conflict is hottest, and the man hears, as it 
were, the eternal voice, to which he responds, and he 
knows that not in Pilate's cynicism lies the final an- 
swer, but in Christ's great appeal: — 

"Every one that is of the truth heareth My voice." 

Rough men know this ; soldier men knew it ; knew it 
under conditions when anything like the religious life 
seemed impossible ; but they knew it, and their knowl- 
edge was the supremest testimony to the grandeur of 
Christ. 

Studdert Kennedy, who interprets the ordinary 
man's mind with insight, has one little poem which 
speaks of a soldier who fell asleep and dreamed. He 
dreamed he had passed into the other world : 

" 'Twere all men's face, yet no man's face, 
And a face no man could see; 
Yet it seemed to say, in a silent speech, 
'You did them all to me.' 

" The dirty things you did to them, 
The filth you thought so fine : 
You did them all to me,' it said, 
Tor all their souls are mine.' 

"And then, at last, he said one word, 
He just said one word, 'Well?' 
And I said in a trembling voice: 
'Please can I go to hell?' 



42 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

" 'You can't ; that hell is for the blind, 
And not for those that see. 
You know you have earned it, lad, 
So you must follow me. 

" 'Follow me in the paths of pain, 
Seeking what you have seen, 
Until at last you can build the IS 
.With the bricks of might have been/ 

"I've got to follow what I've seen, 
Till this old body dies, 
For I daren't face, in the land of grace, 
The sorrow of those eyes." 



IV 

THE THREE CROSSES 

TEXT: John 19:18. And with Him two others, on either 
side one, and Jesus in the midst. 

THERE were three crosses on Calvary and with- 
out the three Calvary was not complete. We 
have erred somewhat when we have concentrated all 
our attention upon the central cross. There were 
three; not one of the evangelists has missed that fact; 
it had its deep significance. One cross, standing alone 
is an inexplicable thing, it does not reveal God fully, 
it does not satisfy the heart deeply; there were three 
and it is because there were three that that central cross 
was set up. It bears witness to the absolute identity 
of God with man. 

Our fathers used to concern themselves with the 
mystery of the cross. To them it was of God's ap- 
pointing before the foundation of the world, and the 
Master was destined to come to it because God had set 
it up. It puzzled them to explain their theory in terms 
of daily life. They had to answer the unanswerable 
question, — If the cross was set up there by the will of 
God, what then was the measure of guilt of those 
who brought Jesus to the cross? Was Judas truly 
guilty, if after all he was but fulfilling the eternal 
decrees of the Almighty? What was the measure of 

43 



44 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

Pilate's guilt if the cross was established by the fiat 
of the Supreme? 

I want to say reverently, I do not believe God set 
up the cross, — man set it up. God set up the beauty, 
the truth, the righteousness, the love, the courage of 
Jesus Christ, — these things brought Him to the cross ; 
the cross which was a sadly familiar object in those 
days; the cross upon which many men were done to 
death in those barbarous times. The efficacy of Cal- 
vary is not in the engine of death, it is in the Spirit of 
Christ, it is in the eternal Spirit which was behind and 
within the Christ. 

Have you considered that after all those two male- 
factors were condemned to death by the same people 
| and for the same reason as Jesus Himself? They 
were done to death, those two thieves, because it 
was believed that their lives and their activities were 
subversive of the State. Jesus was done to death 
for the same reason. The bitterness of the Chief 
Priests and the Rulers was engendered because they 
thought that His influence was damaging to the cus- 
toms and institutions with which their own lives were 
bound up, and which they held, conscientiously enough, 
had been established by God. They were right. The 
influence of Jesus was subversive concerning those in- 
stitutions. The final argument which they brought to 
bear upon the vacillating Pilate was that this Man 
claimed to set up an authority which was contrary to 
that of Caesar, and though Pilate hardly believed it 
himself, they insinuated that if he did not give the word 
that condemned Him to death they would report that he 
was not true to his over-lord, to Caesar. Pilate gave 



THE THREE CROSSES 45 

Jesus to the same death as he gave the two thieves and 
for the same reason. 

They were violently, blatantly antagonistic to the 
State, they had lifted up hands of rebellion; they were 
leaders of insurrection ; they were perpetrators of rob- 
bery and he condemned them to death in the interests 
of the State. Jesus was not violent, He was no robber, 
He lifted no hands of rebellion against the State, yet 
His enemies were instinctively right after all; — there 
was that about Jesus which was infinitely more danger- 
ous to the institutions of that time than the puny re- 
bellion of such as these two thieves. From their point 
of view those three crosses were identical; they were 
all there because these three men were considered to be 
dangerous. 

Jesus did not seek the cross, but He accepted it. He 
sought the Will of God, He sought the salvation of 
man. They threatened Him with the cross and He ac- 
cepted it. There was no special merit in that method 
of death taken by itself. Jesus suffered "by the 
Eternal Spirit/' as the writer of the Epistle to the 
Hebrews said. He accepted the cross, and the cross 
in the wisdom of God became the symbol and the 
means of salvation. 

Jesus took His place in the midst of the other two. 
He need not be separated from them. Theirs was the 
wrong way, His was the right. Theirs were check- 
ered and sin-stained personalities; His was holy and 
true. If God was in Him as we believe, reconciling the 
world unto Himself, the great truth that lies in the 
heart of His passion is that God is identified with men; 
He comes down into the midst of the sons of men. If 



46 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

they set up crosses God will take up His cross. It is 
not an absentee God we worship, it is an immanent 
God. Jesus crucified between two thieves bears wit- 
ness to the identity of God with man even in his folly 
and in his sin. 

That is a truth which is being pressed home to the 
conscience and the understanding of the world in our 
time with a greater intensity probably than ever be- 
fore. It is the only truth that will save men and 
keep for them their religious faith. They have lost 
hold of that absentee God of whom our fathers seem 
to speak so often, and humanity, only too conscious of 
its own crosses is feeling out after the God who comes 
down into the midst of its own sorrows, takes one of 
its crosses for Himself and transforms it into a thing 
of glory and of love. 

F. W. H. Myers has put into the lips of St. Paul 
very daring words which carry that thought : — 

"Thou with strong prayer and very much entreating 
Wiliest be asked, and Thou shalt answer then, 
Show the hid heart beneath creation beating, 
Smile with kind eyes and be a man with men. 

"Were it not thus, O King of my salvation, 
Many would curse to Thee, and I for one, 
Fling Thee Thy bliss and snatch at Thy damnation 
Scorn and abhor the shining of the sun. 

"Ring with a reckless shivering of laughter 
Wroth at the woe which Thou hast seen so long; 
Question if any recompense hereafter 
Waits to atone the intolerable wrong." 



THE THREE CROSSES 47 

The only answer to the bitter cry of the human 
heart in such a mood as that, is that God in Christ 
came down into the midst of man's crosses, the crosses 
of his folly, his sin and his rebellion, and taking the 
one that came to Him, was crucified between two 
thieves. 

The three crosses bear witness to the refusal of the 
divine to accept a salvation which did not involve that 
of others. 

"Save Thyself, come down from the Cross," 

was the cry of the multitude. It rang out in differing 
tones, uttered by differing moods. It was hissed out in 
bitter hatred by the Chief Priests; it was laughed out 
in scorn by the rough soldiers; it was whispered in 
pity by the stricken disciples, — ■ 

"Save Thyself, and come down from the cross. ,, 

Nobody was thinking of the two thieves upon their 
crosses! See how the multitude presses about the 
three of them. Nobody is concerned about the thieves, 
or cares whether they shall come down from their 
crosses or not. They hang, in a loneliness which is 
more bitter in the midst of a crowd than if it were in 
the midst of a desert. All eyes are upon the Son of 
God. 

"Save Thyself if Thou be the Christ !" 

And they did not know that even there on His right 
and on His left were two reasons why He could not 
save Himself. 

What would you have Him do? Would you have 



48 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

Him come down from His central cross and leave the 
two thieves hanging upon theirs? Would you have 
Him descend from His central cross and bring down 
too this bitter, rebellious impenitent one as well as the 
broken penitent one? Hear the cry of the impenitent 
thief himself: — 

"If thou be the Christ save Thyself and us," 

and the Christ offered the only salvation that was 
possible for them as well as for Himself, by enduring 
to the end, ready to respond to the cry of the penitent 
thief that reached Him amidst His anguish in the dark- 
ness : — • 

"Lord remember me when Thou comest into Thy 
Kingdom." 

The cross has always been a stumbling block to 
men, it will always be a stumbling block. To many it 
seems incredible that the Son of God should so suffer, 
but I believe we are learning, and it is one of God's 
great truths for our time, that God Himself can only 
save by suffering, by bearing the burdens of the sons 
of men and being in all their afflictions Himself afflicted. 

There were three crosses, and it is the three crosses 
that bear witness to the uniqueness of Jesus. To 
observe the uniqueness of Jesus, put Him with others ; 
v it is a mistake to separate Him. Theology has not 
served men much in the end in its endeavour to take 
Jesus of Nazareth and make Him altogether separate 
from the sons of men; to exalt Him above humanity 
with its temptations and its sins, to make Him as it 
were a shadowy unreality through whom God shone; 



THE THREE CROSSES 49 

to refuse as though it were an impious thing that the 
human mind should compare Jesus with others. 

Let Him he compared! It is when He is in the 
midst of others that He is unique. Put Jesus amongst 
the world's millions, say the best you can about them 
all. Do not as our fathers used to do, express deprecia- 
tion of Socrates, Plato and the great souls who lived 
before or without knowing Jesus as though to credit 
them with the natural goodness which was theirs was 
somehow to undermine the majesty of the Christ and 
the efficacy of His salvation. Do not do that. Recog- 
nise the good wherever you can find it in this age or 
in any other age, in this place or in any place. Not 
only recognise it but seek for it as a diamond seeker 
seeks for his diamonds and be glad whenever you have 
found it. You will not depreciate the value of the 
cross, you will add to it. It was Jesus of Nazareth, 
standing amidst the sons of men, standing as He 
veritably stood in the days of His flesh without any 
adventitious conditions, without any ceremony or state, 
Man among men! who is the glory of God. You are 
getting nearer to God when you are really getting 
nearer to man. It is not that there is an inherent an- 
tagonism between the two, beside the antagonism that 
comes of human sin. Jesus is not less divine because 
He is so human. Let him be crucified between two 
thieves ; they meant it in scorn. These narrow-minded 
bigoted Pharisees and Leaders thought they added to 
the sting of His cross, to the poignancy of His thorny 
crown when they took Him before whom their souls 
cowered as in the presence of a Master and set Him 
up in the sun between two thieves; this one with the 



50 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

oaths and curses upon his lips only seemed to them in 
their folly and in their bitterness to add to the degrada- 
tion of the Christ who hung so patiently in the midst. 
But let Him be. The world knows that though there 
were three crosses they who hung upon them were not 
the same, and this one in the middle was luminous with 
God. This one in the middle had the ages in His hand, 
this central cross was magnetic, it was to attract the 
world, hold the world, save the world. Let Him be 
in the middle! You do Him no service when you 
make the cross an ornament of gold and surround it 
with your ecclesiastical millineries. When you make 
the old blood-stained thing to be a gilded trinket, you 
dishonour it, — Let it alone ! Rugged ? Let it be rugged. 
Blood-stained? Let it be blood-stained. Scorned? Let 
it be scorned. They spat in His face? Let them 
spit in His face, they only shame themselves and not 
Him. The Christ with the spittle of His enemies 
upon His cheek is not degraded; you cannot de- 
grade from without, degradation can only come from 
within. Let Him be in the midst. By all means 
teach men that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. I 
believe that, with all my soul; but He is all the more 
the Son of God to me because He is man as I am, flesh 
of my flesh, bone of my bone, buffeted, tempest-tossed, 
even as I am. Let Him be in the midst ; the world has 
had a long while now to watch Him, question Him, 
believe Him, disbelieve Him, love Him, hate Him, obey 
Him, disobey Him. A long while now, but there is 
only one Jesus yet. There will not be another and in 
Him and through Him shines the glory of the Eternal 
God. God transformed the cross, He would have 



THE THREE CROSSES 51 

transformed a gallows just the same. It was not the 
cross, it was the Christ who made the thing of shame 
to be a thing of glory, who made the hate and bitterness 
of men to reveal the love of God. 

"O love of God, O sin of man ! 
In this dread act your strength is tried; 
And victory remains with love; 
Jesus our Lord is crucified." 

So sang a Roman Catholic Priest, and thus sang 
Whittier, a Puritan poet: — 

"O Lord and Master of us all? 
Whate'er our name or sign, 
We own Thy sway, we hear Thy call, 
JVe test our lives by Thine. 

'Thou judgest us : Thy purity 
Doth all our lusts condemn ; 
The love that draws us nearer Thee 
Is hot with wrath to them. 

"To Thee our full humanity, 
Its joys and pains belong; 
The wrongs of man to man on Thee 
Inflict a deeper wrong. 

"Deep strike Thy roots, O heavenly vine* 
Within our earthly sod, 
Most human and yet most divine, 
The flower of man and god." 



V 

THE INCOMPLETE PASSION 

TEXT : Colossians i :24. I Paul am made a minister ; who 
now rejoice in my sufferings for you and fill up that 
which is lacking in the afflictions of Christ. 

STRANGE that Paul of all men should suggest 
that there was something lacking in the afflictions 
of Christ, as though He had not suffered enough; as 
though He had not fulfilled the demands of God and 
of man in the passion on Calvary. 

Of course when we know Paul we feel at once 
that whatever he meant he did not mean to suggest 
anything derogatory concerning the great Saviour or 
the power of His Cross. Words always derive their 
value from the character of those who speak them. 
They are like the notes of our currency, their ulti- 
mate value is the opinion of men concerning those 
who issue them. There are some men whose every 
word is like minted gold. There are other men 
who would need to speak thousands of words to reach 
the value of one word sterling. We who know Paul 
have read his letters, have seen his soul made bare 
by his own hand, know that there has never lived 
a man in this world who had a more tremendous 
reverence for Jesus of Nazareth and to whom His 
Cross was more wonderful in its glory. 

52 



THE INCOMPLETE PASSION 53 

"God forbid," said he once, "that I should glory 
save in the Cross of my Lord Jesus Christ, by whom 
the world is crucified unto me and I unto the world." 

We may be sure that whatever St. Paul meant 
when he used those words he did not mean for one 
moment to detract from the value and the glory of 
the Cross on Calvary. 

But it seems to me that Paul took a reasonable view 
of things when he suggested that even Christ has not 
done everything on the Cross of Calvary. There was 
something lacking even in His affliction. Paul could 
never have been betrayed into that extravagance of 
emotionalism concerning the death of Christ into 
which many Christian people often enough think it 
their duty to plunge, especially in this season of Lent. 
Paul had suffered too much as a servant of Christ 
not to know that physical suffering is limited, not to 
have discovered that the soul can triumph over the 
greatest pain and be its conqueror. You notice in this 
passage before us how Paul links together the ideas 
of rejoicing and suffering — "who now rejoice in my 
suffering for you." Paul had discovered that when 
a man suffers for a great and noble cause, though he 
may feel the pain bitterly, there is a triumph, nay, 
there is a joy that comes to the soul in such an hour 
that is unspeakable. 

I am sure that Paul, for one, would never have 
pitied Jesus Christ in His passion upon Calvary. 

If I were a painter I think I should like to paint 
the Crucifixion again. I am not satisfied with so 
many pictures of the Christ upon the Cross. It re- 
volts me to see that sacred face marked with every 



54, THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

look of woe and of piteous appeal, as though He were 
saying to the sons of men — "Was there ever a sorrow 
like mine? I suffer for thee." I should like to paint 
the Christ, not without blood, not without pain, of 
course, but with the great soul looking out from the 
languishing eyes, seeing the ages unrolling before 
Him, conscious of His union with God, His identity 
with His Will; with the great Face all alight with 
joy unspeakable and full of glory. 

I know it is a sacred subject and the tongue would 
rather be silent than speak concerning it. I know 
that the finer the soul, the more refined its sensibility; 
the clearer its vision of the world's need the greater 
must be its anguish. There was a poignancy about 
the Saviour's suffering about which the blaspheming 
thief upon his neighbouring cross knew nothing; it 
was not his world. Ay, but there was a bitterness 
about the dying thief's blasphemy with a broken and 
ruined life trailing behind it that was not in Christ's 
world. One was a broken and defeated thing, re- 
viling in the midst of his defeat, the other was a tri- 
umphant soul, glorying and rejoicing in the midst 
of His anguish. The happiest soul on Calvary was 
that of Jesus. Mingled with His pain was unspeakable 
joy! 

I think we have done our Lord injury in the eyes 
of men when we have exaggerated the physical pains 
of His passion. I think we have insulted Him when 
we have offered; Him to the pity of mankind as 
though He were a broken outcast who needs must be 
received into the humani heart out of sheer com- 
passion. No! The Christ was never so grand as in 



THE INCOMPLETE PASSION 55 

the hour of His travail. And His sufferings? — Oh, 
after all, was it not but nine hours the sun shone upon 
Him in the anguish of the Cross? Have not men 
suffered longer than nine hours, are there not some 
kinds of physical anguish which come to the ordinary- 
sons of men that are as poignant and even more last- 
ing than those of Calvary? No — that was not the 
glory of the Son of God; He is not the object of 
human pity, His claim upon the soul is not addressed 
to the compassions of men. 

And there were limitations to the efficacy of His 
travail. There were people outside the sweep of Cal- 
vary who had never seen it and never heard of it, who 
could not be ^influenced by it, just as there are many 
people even now to whom Calvary is an unknown 
word, and were it known it would have no meaning. 

It was Paul's wonderful Christology which enabled 
him to see that what happened at Calvary was only 
what is happening all the time, that the Cross is in 
the heart of God and that is why it was on the Hill 
outside Jerusalem. God made clear in Christ what 
had been His attitude towards the sin and folly of 
men and from the very beginning He has borne it upon 
His heart. If Calvary had never taken place the 
heart of God would have been the same, His attitude 
to men would have been the same, though men might 
not have known it. Calvary revealed to men the heart 
of the Unseen God, gave to them a new view of Him, 
brought Him nearer to them, taught them that He 
was bound up in the bundle of life with them, that 
when they sinned they smote at Him and that He 
bare the burden of their sin. 



56 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

It is the greatest mystery in the world, the mystery 
we never fathom, it is a mystery that keeps us sane 
and reverent and helps us to love God. Were it not 
for Calvary we might forget Him, we might even hate 
Him. Calvary keeps its mystic fingers upon the chords 
of our hearts, haunts and purines us with the thought 
of a great love that will not let us go. 

Now when Paul faced the facts of his own life 
he saw at once that he must carry the spirit of Calvary 
into his own surroundings. When he heard the voice 
of the men of Macedonia in his dream saying, "Come 
over and help us," of what use would it have been for 
Paul to say, "But Jesus died on Calvary for you?" 
No use at all. Paul saw that the limitations of Jesus' 
life prevented Him appealing to the Macedonians. His 
habitat was Judea, His place of sacrifice was outside 
the walls of Jerusalem, He would have died as will- 
ingly for the Macedonians as He died for the Jews. 
He would have been crucified outside Philippi as 
readily as outside Jerusalem had it been possible. 
Jerusalem was the place where His life was cast, 
Jerusalem was that strange centre of religious influ- 
ence that made the way, made the place, made the 
hour. The Christ offered Himself up at Jerusalem, 
not for Jerusalem only but for the world. Paul saw 
that if Macedonia was to be reached it was not 
enough to appeal to the sacrifice at Jerusalem, some 
one else must go in the spirit of the Christ and repeat 
in Macedonia in his own flesh what the Christ had 
done in Judea. 

Paul felt that he went to fill up that which was 
lacking in the afflictions of Christ. You see, it was 



THE INCOMPLETE PASSION 57 

the great thought that Jesus was still with him that 
made Paul what he was. That is the fundamental 
thing in Christianity as I see it. It is the question 
whether Jesus Christ is still alive. You will explain 
the resurrection conditioned by the limitations of your 
understanding and knowledge and experience; doubt- 
less the truth transcends the explanation of your mind, 
but the question is, Is Jesus Christ alive now and al- 
ways? Is He only a historical figure, fading away 
as the centuries pass on, or is His spirit still with 
men? Are we to live to-day, nineteen hundred years 
away from His earthly life, as if He were still alive in 
our midst ? There was no question about that in Paul's 
mind. It was that which transformed him. He felt 
that while he himself was in the flesh, visible, corporeal, 
that the Master was with him, invisible, spiritual. 
Paul wanted to do in his flesh that which he felt the 
Master would have him do. When he saw the same 
kind of wrongs in Europe or some other place as 
those which brought about the Cross of Calvary, he 
wanted to face those wrongs in the same spirit as 
the Master had faced them at Jerusalem. When Paul 
saw great iniquities in the world that came down with 
crushing weight upon the sons of men he wanted to 
lift them with the same sacrificial effort as his Master 
had lifted them at Jerusalem. He did not put him- 
self on the same level as his Master, the Master was 
to him a towering, snow-capped, cloud-piercing moun- 
tain. Paul was but a little mole-hill at the base of 
the mountain. It was not that he put his sacrifice 
on the same plane as the sacrifice of Christ, only he 



58 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

did believe that the same spirit that was manifested 
at Calvary should be manifested in him. 

So his life was a sacrificial life, and he was filling 
up so far as he could that which was lacking in the af- 
flictions of Christ. Why, my friends, if Christ is 
eternal, if His Spirit is the never flagging Spirit of 
the eternal God do you not think He has suffered 
much more since Calvary than at Calvary? Those 
age-long crimes that have weighed down the sons of 
men, do you not think they have meant more to the 
heart of God than the physical anguish of those nine 
hours on Calvary? Was Calvary so bad as that great 
war of ours? I do not think so. I think He suffered 
more then than at Calvary. It is the great heart of 
the Eternal that is so wonderfully kind, that bears 
every wrong to the sons of men upon His own quiver- 
ing tissue. 

That is the truth that Christianity is trying to make 
clear; with halting words as it were, with vague 
shadowy outlines but with wonderful power and pen- 
etrating force, that is the truth that lies in the heart 
of the Christian faith. We men and women have got 
to learn that there is a Cross in the heart of God's 
world and that evil is removed in the end by the 
Cross. 

I was very interested the other day in turning over 
the leaves of a hymn-book published by a Society 
which claims to be humanitarian but not especially 
Christian. It is labouring for the bringing in of 
a better social order, and I noted they had taken that 
hymn of the blind saint, George Matheson : — 



THE INCOMPLETE PASSION 59 

"O Love, that wilt not let me go, 
I rest my weary soul in Thee; 
I give Thee back the life I owe, 
That in Thine ocean depths its flow 
May richer, fuller be. 

"O Light, that followest all my way, 
I yield my flickering torch to Thee ; 
My heart restores its borrowed ray, 
That in Thy sunshine's blaze its day 
May brighter, fairer 06.'' 

They had published that verse : — ■ 

"O Joy, that seekest me through pain, 
I cannot close my heart to Thee ; 
I trace the rainbow through the rain, 
And feel the promise is not vain 
That morn shall tearless be." 

But one verse they had left out: — 

"O Cross, that liftest up my head, 
I dare not ask to fly from Thee ; 
I lay in dust life's glory dead, 
And from the ground there blossom red 
Life that shall endless be." 

They had left that out. Yes, they are always leav- 
ing it out ! They want their Utopias, they want their 
better social orders, but they want it for the sake 
of getting more not giving more. They want the 
crown but not the Cross, and they will not see that 
the one thing that stands in the way of all our 
Utopias is the unwillingness to bear the Cross. It 
is the unwillingness to give, it is the refusal to in- 



60 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

terpret life in sacrificial terms, that is where our 
Utopias always break down. The men who have 
made the world better than it was have always been 
the men who have carried the Cross in their hearts. 

The Cross is not a strange and foreign thing. It 
is in the heart of things because it is in the heart 
of God. O God, forgive us, we are almost ashamed 
to use the word Sacrifice, it sounds so trite upon our 
well-fed lips, and yet we know the truth is there and 
it makes all the difference to a man's life in the end 
whether he has got such a vision of life as that he 
can see it not in terms of reward but in terms of 
sacrifice, whether he can spend and be spent for the 
good of his fellows, whether he can labour to bring 
in a better day by filling up on his part that which was 
lacking in the afflictions of Christ. 

Surely the Lenten season means that kind of thing 
or it means nothing. Surely we had better give up 
celebrating it if we only mean to shed the tears of our 
vapid sentimentality about the Cross of Jesus Christ — 
the grandest, noblest, most triumphant thing this world 
ever saw! If we mean to defile that by our shallow 
sentimentality our fastings and our prayers, we had 
better give up celebrating the Lenten Season. What 
the Lenten Season really means is the glory of sacrifice 
and the validity of the life that carries the Cross and 
joy in its heart. 



VI 

THE GOD OF THE LIVING 

TEXT : Luke 20 138. For He is not a God of the dead, but 
of the living: for all live unto Him. 

IF Jesus had cared to descend to the intellectual level 
of those Sadducees he might easily have parried the 
point of this absurd story of theirs concerning the 
woman who had seven husbands. He might have ques- 
tioned for instance its probability. One would not say 
it was impossible but at least it was improbable. Maybe 
it was merely an anecdote ; who would care to enquire 
into the antecedents of an anecdote? If this story 
was something they had invented they were clever 
men; if it was something they had believed they were 
gullible men. Most likely it was a story they had 
partly heard and greatly augmented and they smiled 
to themselves when they presented it because they 
thought they had something here which would cut 
away the foundations of the religious claim. 

Seeing again that they came to Him with satire He 
might have met them in the same spirit. I feel as if 
I myself could not have resisted the temptation of com- 
menting upon the heroism of the seven men. To see 
them coming forward to the altar one after the other 
like sheep to the slaughter is an imposing sight. It 
is a heroism which seems to mount steadily upward 

61 



62 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

from that of the first to the fourth, fifth and sixth, 
until that of the seventh man is positively sublime ! 

Or the Master might have asked the question, Why 
drag the subject of the resurrection into such a story 
as that? Would not the problem be precisely the same 
if these seven men had not died at all? Suppose 
like Enoch Arden they had only changed their places of - 
habitation, and come back to find she had pledged her 
troth not to one's self only but to six others, is not 
the problem as to whose wife she will be, precisely the 
same? Why drag in the resurrection at all? The 
Master we know on one occasion, met in the flesh a 
woman of Samaria whose condition was not very 
different to that of this alleged woman. He said to her, 
"You have had five husbands and he whom you now 
have is not your husband ?" In other words she was 
a harlot, and if this woman was a real woman she 
would be little better than a harlot though each suc- 
cessive union had been sanctified by the rites of the 
Church. There is a legalised harlotry as well as an 
illegal, and relationships whether in this world or in 
the next depend upon affinity. One would not say 
it was not possible to love a second or third time, but 
seven times is going beyond all decency, and love if 
it were worth calling love, would have been so stretched 
and strained and have become so attenuated as not 
to be worth considering at all. Unless they had de- 
clined in wisdom why should they want to claim her as 
their own in the next world any more than they would 
have done in this? 

But merely to suggest these ways in which the 
Master might had He chosen have met the satire and 



THE GOD OF THE LIVING 63 

subtlety of the Sadducees is to degrade Him. You feel 
at once that is the kind of line Jesus could not and 
would not have taken. He lifted this tawdry incident 
up to the heights of sublimity. He always did that. 
He spoke not so much to those crafty Sadducees as to 
that pathetic multitude behind them, not so much to 
the multitude as to the ages behind them, the ages 
which include you and me. He laid down at once 
this startling and striking thesis : — 

"God is not the God of the dead, but of the living; 
for all live unto Him." 

I would like to stress that first clause : "God is 
not the God of the dead." The moment you say there 
is anything dead you have minimised God. The dead 
need no God. If there be death, so far at any rate 
there is no God. If all the world be dead, why should 
there be a God? Materialism by a fatal necessity 
degenerates into Atheism, it cannot avoid the pit. Once 
talk of death, once blot out life with death and in- 
evitably your faith in God diminishes. It is possible 
I know, to maintain some dim and hazy belief in a 
divine being who makes stars which are only to be 
burnt out and souls which are bruised into nothing- 
ness by blind matter, but it is not with your whole mind 
you picture Him. It is only by certain logical pro- 
cesses you do it; you have not used your will, you 
have not given play to your emotion, you have pic- 
tured by merely logical processes a most abhorrent, 
a most impossible being, one who flings dead worlds 
forever round his throne as we have seen jugglers 
flinging balls in the air and keeping them in motion. 



64 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

We have regarded that as an illustration of perverted 
ingenuity. There is no God when once you yield to 
death. 

Jesus said, and I think there were worlds of mean- 
ing in it as He spoke it: — "God is not the God of 
the dead." There is nothing dead. 

We have yielded in these last fifty years or more to a 
materialism which took us down, down, down, farther 
and farther into the pit, and that craving which seems 
to possess almost all men now to work their way back 
to a more spiritual interpretation of life is instinctive 
as well as logical. It is an effort of self-preservation. 
The world knows in its heart that if you yield to the 
sway of dead matter you have no God and you have no 
hope. The truth rather is that everything lives. The 
earth bringeth forth fruit "of herself," first the blade, 
then the ear, then the full corn in the ear ; therefore the 
earth is a living thing. 

Henry Drummondt, that <great saint, in his day 
drew attention to what he believed was a chasm ex- 
isting between the inorganic and the organic, but no 
man would take his stand at that point to-day. It is 
hard to believe now that there is a gap between the 
inorganic and the organic. There may be some links 
of the chain which for the moment are out of our view, 
but few men doubt now that the chain is there. 

The farther you go back and the meaner the forms 
of existence or of matter seem to be, you do not dimin- 
ish the wonder, but only increase it. Whatever was at 
the beginning of the Universe had in it, potentially at 
any rate, the present and the future. Matter itself is 
a spiritual thing. There is no dead thing in God's 



THE GOD OF THE LIVING 65 

Universe, it is all alive: — "He is not the God of the 
dead, but the God of the living." Creation is not a 
diminishing thing, it is a goblet that is filling to the 
brim with increasing life; "God," said Jesus, "is the 
God of the living." 

He spoke of Abraham to those Sadducees. Abraham 
was as they said, dead. He had been dead for cen- 
turies and yet every man of them, Sadducees, Pharisees 
and the people generally called themselves the sons of 
Abraham. In the days when Abraham lived in the flesh 
he had difficulty in qualifying to be called a father at 
all. Ishmael was the child of his despair; Isaac, the 
solitary child of his faith, was born when Abraham was 
a hundred years old, and as Paul said long afterwards, 
"as good as dead." It was with the greatest difficulty 
in the days of his flesh that any one person could call 
Abraham father, and lo, here they were, tens of thou- 
sands of them, all claiming to be his children, believing 
that the family of Abraham was yet to increase, that 
maybe the day would come when all the world would 
acknowledge him as father. Though their dreams 
were never historically fulfilled, yet it is a fact to-day 
that every Jew upon the earth calls Abraham father, 
every Christian and every Mohammedan upon the earth 
likewise calls him father, — strange that you should 
speak of a man as living when he had but the slightest 
claim to fatherhood, and as dead when myriads of his 
spiritual children acknowledge him. 

Here in this City Temple to-night, there are some 
two thousand of us worshipping God. I venture to 
think that nine hundred and ninety-nine parts of this 
service are contributed by those whom we call dead. 



66 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

Who are we? Blown in here upon the winds as it 
were for a few transient moments. What have we 
to do with the City Temple? This is a place that is 
full of the dead. It is instinct with the personality of 
Joseph Parker, who is dead; it is thrilling with the 
influence of Campbell and Newton, who are no longer 
here. Most of the hands that built this place, laying 
brick upon brick, stone upon stone, are stiff and still 
in the grave to-day. These hymns that we have been 
singing, who gave them to us? Those we call dead. 
This Book that ever lies as the central object upon 
this desk, what is it? It is the living essence of the 
dead, the great, grave, godly dead, the men of faith 
and intuition; they live still! I am but a poor stam- 
merer who strives to repeat their words, Oh, this Book! 
There are millions who have part in it, it is all wet with 
the tears, it is all pulsating with the hopes of millions 
more. They are all there, — Tertullian, Augustine, St. 
Francis of Assisi, Savonarola, Calvin, Knox, WyclifTe, 
Tyndale, Coverdale, Wesley, Bunyan, Howard, White- 
field, — these and millions more who are all as you say 
dead. We who live are the last, the least, the foam 
upon the face of the illimitable deep. 

These lives that we live, are they not far more the 
continuation of theirs whom we call dead than merely 
our own? The words that we use day after day, 
which one of them is your word? Not one. They 
were coined for you, fashioned for you by those you 
say are dead. You cannot even express what is in 
your mind, nor let it trickle over the threshold of your 
lips without borrowing prodigally from those whom 
you call dead. Oh, the arrogance of it, that we sweep 



THE GOD OF THE LIVING 67 

them all away, say they are all dead, and we only are 
alive. 

That word Love. There are a thousand million 
heart-throbs in that one word. I have only got the 
merest modicum of right to that word. It has been 
made by the multitude whom I, in my arrogance, speak 
of as if they were dead. These laws, customs, insti- 
tutions of ours, — are they our fashioning, or have 
they been fashioned for us? This old grimy city of 
London, — its population is not six or seven millions, it 
is six hundred millions ! You cannot walk along Hol- 
born or Fleet Street, but whether you know it or not you 
are passing by or passing through myriads of those who 
made those places what they are. Human history is a 
pyramid, each successive generation represents the 
last and narrowest tier upon it. Every race that has 
existed in this world has made its contribution to the 
pyramid of life. Rome, Greece, Carthage, Babylon, — 
they are all there. If they had been different we would 
have been different. If Romanism had been different, 
Protestantism would never have been born. If Prot- 
estantism had been different in its beginnings we 
might never have been here at all. You must either 
think of a God whose creation is diminishing so that 
constantly it narrows as it were to a point and becomes 
less and less until finally it would not be worth being 
God to, or you must think of a creation that is all 
alive, and a God who is not the God of the dead but 
the God of the living. 

I know what you are saying in your heart. You 
are saying, "that is casuistry, you are playing with 
words." A young student said to me recently, "I do 



68 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

not believe in a personal immortality, but I believe 
that we live on by the influence we exert." Yes, but 
does not influence need a God to care for it? Is not 
influence greater than men themselves? If living 
men need a superintending God, what about influ- 
ence? — the thing that grows and grows continually, 
the thing you never know how to check. Influence? 
That is the greatest thing in the world. Influence! 
When William Shakespeare lived he was not known 
out of England, his life was so obscure that even now 
after ceaseless investigation you can hardly be sure of 
its outlines, but William Shakespeare's influence is in- 
finitely greater than William Shakespeare himself. In- 
fluence? If I were asked who caused the great war I 
would not say the ex-Kaiser Wilhelm, nor Von Beth- 
mann-Holweg, nor Von Moltke, nor Hindenburg, — I 
think I would say two men who are dead. Napoleon 
in France and Bismarck in Germany, and they are both 
as you say, dead. Napoleon, who by his ruthless tram- 
pling upon and crushing of the divided Germanic 
peoples caused them to strive for the accomplishment 
of a national unity, which was never achieved until 
Bismarck carved it one by the sword. These are the 
men; they are dead you say, but their influence lives. 
Maybe the Christian religion is right after all in 
the suggestion it makes that the judgment is the last 
thing of ail. No man is ready to be judged until the 
world is done with, because his life is not over, his influ- 
ence is still affecting other men for good or ill. Influ- 
ence ? Tell me, as you must tell me, that there is such a 
thing as living influence, and I say there must be a 
God to be cognisant of it, to take notice of it, to judge 



THE GOD OF THE LIVING 69 

it. Influence? When does a deed live? When you 
do it or afterwards? The blow you strike in anger, 
takes but a second, but for years afterwards you are 
thinking of it, dealing with it. When does a word live ? 
A word unspoken is like a babe unborn, you know 
not whether it is male or female, dark or fair, tall or 
short. Your unspoken word is as a babe unborn, but 
once spoken it must live out its life. 

The sin committed in one wild moment of passionate 
self-will, does it die with the passing of that moment? 
No, not for fifty years after maybe. 

The truth rather is that nothing lives until it is 
"dead." You do not know what childhood is until 
childhood is gone. Children never explain themselves, 
they only live and love and laugh. The knowledge 
we have of childhood we owe mostly to the mind of 
maturity philosophising upon what it no longer pos- 
sesses. 

You do not know what youth is until middle age 
dawns upon you and you begin to look back and ana- 
lyse its sentiments and investigate its fires. Then you 
discover what you mean by youth, — when you have 
lost it. 

Maybe we never know what life is until it is gone or 
almost gone. The old man and the old woman are 
living upon the past. The long tale of the past is their 
real life and it never was so real to them as now when 
it has gone. Influence? Oh, there are lives that have 
touched yours and mine that are more powerful now 
they are silent in the grave than they ever were while 
they lived. I had a Mother. She could not give me 
much, but she gave me love and vision, and life swept 



70 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

me away from the shelter of her roof very early. The 
vast distances of my native land swept me five hundred 
miles away from her. I travelled a thousand miles to 
get her parting blessing. You say she is dead, I know 
better! She lives, and never lived so fully and so 
richly as now. God is not the God of the dead, He is 
the God of the living, and all live unto Him. His crea- 
tion is a foaming goblet which ever fills more and more 
up to the brim, otherwise I would pity God if I could 
believe in Him at all. 

These lives of ours are to be measured not by the 
length of their days but by the persistence of their in- 
fluence. The fact is, if we want to live truly at this 
moment we must live with the future moments still in 
view. We should live better if we thought of those 
who are not yet born as already alive, although the 
door has not yet been thrown open which reveals them 
to our view. 

That is no true statesmanship which has not its eye 
upon the closed door of the future out of which the 
sons of men are to come presently. The statesmanship 
which only concerns itself with the minority whose 
votes fall into the ballot-box is not true statesmanship. 
There is a constituency whose votes are not counted 
by the scrutineers but who are all final arbiters — it con- 
sists of those who have already marched past and 
those who are yet to march. 

The religion which only concerns itself with the 
present is not a true religion. The true religion must 
comprehend the past and open the way for the future. 
You must keep your eye upon the unborn, shape your 
teaching, direct your activities and fashion your insti- 



THE GOD OF THE LIVING 71 

tutions not to preserve the limited knowledge of this 
generation but to open the way for those who are to 
come after. You must keep yourself clean if for no 
more valid reason than that there are those who are 
not yet born who will bless you if you were clean, 
and curse you if you were unclean. Life is a growing 
thing and men build themselves into it. God's purposes 
do not diminish but increase by the complexity and 
manifold inter-communication and inter-relationship of 
that vast flood of life which is pouring forth from His 
exhaustless heart. 

Not the God of the dead but the God of the living. 

Jesus Christ Himself is dead, nobody asserts that 
more earnestly than Christian people themselves. 
Sceptics have wanted to say that He did not die, or 
at least did not die at the time when they said He did. 
The Christian has laboured to make it credible that 
He did die only because He intuitively knew that out 
of His death would come life. He lives because He 
died. 

For me immortality is not merely a thing of the 
world to come. I do not believe I am a man of the 
flesh now and will be a pale shadow yonder. I do not 
think God wants pale shadows either in this life or in 
the life to come. I dare to believe that existence in 
the great Beyond is as valid and as palpable and as 
compact of experience of mind and heart and soul as 
it can be in this present world. I do not believe that 
God has created myriads of worlds to be unoccupied. 
I do not believe He has exhausted the capacities of 
human life upon this little planet, in this fevered 
checkered existence between the cradle and the grave. 



72 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

I dare to believe He is the God of the living, and 
to ask you to live as those who will never die. There 
is nothing you ought to do if you can help it that you 
would be ashamed to meet by and by when your sight 
shall be clearer and your judgment truer. If you 
would live well for the moment, live for eternity. If 
you would do true deeds do those deeds by God's grace 
that will become sweeter in your memory and more 
potent in your after experience. 

"Live for those who love you, 
For those who think you true, 
For the Heaven that lies above you 
And awaits your spirit too. 

"For the cause that needs assistance 
For the wrong that needs resistance, 
For the future in the distance 
And the good that you may do." 



VII 

THE CREDULITY OF INCREDULITY 

TEXT: Acts 26:8. Why should it be thought a thing in- 
credible with you that God should raise the dead? 

1 QUESTION if ever there was a speech delivered 
in this world under more adverse conditions than 
those which accompanied this one of Paul's. I have 
been making speeches since I was seventeen years of 
age; I think perhaps there are few people in London 
to-day who speak in public more often than I do. It 
grows upon me increasingly that the effectiveness of a 
speech depends upon many conditions, most of which 
are outside the man himself. Nothing is more impor- 
tant than the state of mind and heart of the people to 
whom the speaker is addressing himself. Consider the 
atmosphere that surrounded the Apostle Paul — 

He had been a prisoner for more than two years, 
beating out his great heart in a close and confined 
room while the world was waiting for his message. 
There had been and there were a number of people 
who sought his death, sought it relentlessly and un- 
reasonably. Two years ago they had tried to persuade 
the Procurator Felix to make away with him, but 
Felix, supposing that Paul because he handled much 
money therefore possessed much money, kept him in 
prison, hoping for a bribe, until political conditions 

73 



74 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

changed and Felix himself went away. When the new 
Procurator, Porcius Festus, came into power, those 
inveterate enemies of Paul's, who were the chief men 
of the city, thought their chance had come, and be- 
sought Festus to sentence him to death. 

Porcius Festus appears to have been one of that 
type of government official who stand upon technicali- 
ties. He had no personal interest in Paul, but he saw 
the weakness in the case for the prosecution. They 
had no distinct charge to bring against this man, and 
he would fain have released him if Paul himself had 
permitted it. But Paul had made his own appeal to 
Caesar and Festus, since he could not pass him on to 
Caesar without a distinct charge to bring against him, 
thought to shift the responsibility from his own 
shoulders to those of Agrippa, who had now come into 
the city, at the same time maintaining his own popu- 
larity with the chief men who hated Paul so bitterly. 

Now comes Agrippa and with him Bernice. Could 
you imagine two people before whom it would be 
more difficult to make a religious speech ? I would not 
stain my lips nor your minds with a description of 
the things that were said about them both. World- 
lings they were, and nothing else. They had consented 
to see this man Paul to while away a pleasant hour 
and to satisfy some little curiosity. 

There then are the chief men of the city — bitter 
enemies; there is Porcius Festus, spineless government 
official; there is Agrippa and his sister, moral degen- 
erates; and there are the chief captains in their robes 
of state, glittering with decorations and orders. And 
lo, there is Paul himself, brought for the moment out 



THE CREDULITY OF INCREDULITY 75 

of an incarceration which had lasted two long years, 
with the shackles still upon him. Could you imagine 
a man making a speech under conditions like that? 
Could you expect him to unbare his great soul and 
tell of the sacred things that had come into his life, 
of the long hours of wrestling and of prayer that he 
might know and do the will of his Master? Such an 
address was impossible. Could you imagine him put- 
ting forth reasons in logical form for that great belief 
in the resurrection of Jesus Christ which had trans- 
formed his own life? Here was no atmosphere, here 
was no audience! Conceive of him bringing forth the 
traditional arguments for that great historical event. 
Incredulity sat upon every face, the incredulity of 
hate, of meticulousness, of moral depravity, of syco- 
phancy. They would laugh him out of court, they 
would scorn his closest reasons. What kind of speech 
could the Apostle make in such an atmosphere as that ? 
I have read this speech over and over again ; I think 
I can to some extent enter into the mind of Paul. 
That kind of speech was impossible to him; there was 
only one defence that would do ; it was offence, and in 
a moment he whom they questioned had become the 
questioner. He flung before those whose minds were 
bent upon him with intent to condemn, the searching 
question : — 

"Why should it be thought a thing incredible with 
you that God should raise the dead?" 

The speech that followed is not an argument at all, 
it is a simple piece of testimony, it is the story of his 
life, the tale of how the great influence had come to 



76 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

him and what he had done in the power of it. Pres- 
ently his eyes began to glow, his speech became fervent, 
his body quivered, as he told the strange tale of the 
things he had seen and what he had endured in re- 
sponse to the heavenly vision. 

When he was in the full flow of his speech, Porcius 
Festus broke in and said : — 

"Paul, thou art beside thyself; much learning hath 
made thee mad." 

That was the biggest compliment he could have paid 
to Paul. That a man like Porcius Festus, who had 
sacrificed truth and right for the sake of mere material 
prosperity, who would keep in favour with the most 
irreconcilable elements rather than take up a stand 
for the truth, should consider from his point of view 
that Paul was a madman was the sublimest compli- 
ment it was in his power to pay. That was the best 
kind of testimony after all that this story of St. Paul's 
was a valid story, for it had permitted him to live a 
life that was inexplicable to Porcius Festus. 

When Agrippa and Bernice and the rest of the 
assembly drew aside to talk together, their verdict was, 
"This man hath done nothing worthy of bonds or of 
death." That was their best tribute to Paul! -That 
this man, whom others had persecuted, had never re- 
taliated; that he who had become the leader of a new 
party with ramifications throughout the known world, 
and whose word was obeyed, had never used his in- 
fluence for the overturning of society or for the bring- 
ing about of a revolution; that this man, through whose 
hands had passed unchecked the lavish gifts of Chris- 



THE CREDULITY OF INCREDULITY 77 

tian folk for the poverty-stricken in Jerusalem and 
other places, had never touched this money for him- 
self ; that he had carried himself through, and had done 
nothing, amidst unusual conditions, worthy of death 
or of bonds, was the best tribute they could pay. 

There on the face of it stands a witness to the kind 
of effect which the belief in Christ and the life beyond 
has upon men. It keeps their hands clean and their 
hearts pure, yet inspires them to live the kind of life 
which according to low worldly standards is eccentric 
and even insane. Paul had made perhaps the most 
skilful apologetic he could possibly have made in the 
presence of an utterly unsympathetic and hostile au- 
dience. 

Paul was right too because he perceived in that 
moment that incredulity has its difficulties as well as 
credulity, that all 'the defence should not be upon the 
part of faith since unfaith has greater problems than 
faith. The marvellous thing about the Faith is that it 
has drawn the fire of the world and survived. I won- 
der if you ever consider what an unfair advantage the 
unbeliever seems to have over the believer. The be- 
liever is compelled to defend a definite point, a distinct 
thesis. The unbeliever may roam all round the en- 
trenched place and choose his point of attack. The 
faith that is bound up in Christ has stood for nineteen 
centuries defending the same few great theses. All 
the thought of the world, the hostility of the world, 
the despair of the world, the growing knowledge of the 
world has surged around it again and again. Every 
point has been attacked, every postern gate has been 
assaulted. That the Faith should be still standing, 



78 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

after nineteen hundred years, is a great tribute to its 
validity and vitality. 

Yet it is unfaith which has the greater defence to 
make after all. It is well sometimes that we Christian 
folk shouid perceive clearly that we are not always 
bound to be upon the defensive. If our proposition 
be not true, let us hear the explanations of those who 
deny its truth. 

Twenty years ago or more Dr. Parker preached 
from this text in this pulpit, and in his own original 
and characteristic way he broke that passage off in the 
middle and rendered it like this : "Why should it be 
thought a thing incredible with you that God . . . ?" 
Ah, that is the word that makes the difference! If 
there be no God why talk about a life beyond? You 
have enough to do to explain the present life. We need 
not ask your reasons concerning a life beyond; you 
have enough to do to explain a blade of grass ; give us 
your explanation of that without God, and we shall be 
glad to hear your continuing explanations. It is that 
word God that makes the difference. 

But if God be there, any kind of God, why should it 
be thought a thing incredible that He should raise the 
dead ? Of all the wonderful things upon which we may 
look is there anything to be compared with the wonder 
of life? Even taking into account all this far-flung 
starry universe, with its thirty millions of stars that we 
can see, is there anything, can there be anything, more 
wonderful than life? What are worlds compared to 
that? Is not that the supreme thing, and if there be a 
God and if there be life, why should it be thought a 
thing incredible that this most wonderful thing should 



THE CREDULITY OF INCREDULITY 79 

outlast and defeat the things that are less than itself? 
I know that the odds are against life. All men die. 
We who are alive are but a small minority of the 
race; the great majority have passed on before. I 
know there are lots of contemptible things that could 
destroy me — some wretched fever germ which, if I 
could see, I should loathe; some cowardly blow in the 
dark, some brutal assassin's bullet; some wretched un- 
foreseen accident in the street or on the railway — I 
know that the odds are against me ; I cannot keep my 
life for twenty-four hours without having passed 
through incredible perils. If I could see them all with 
open eyes it would demand my utmost courage to main- 
tain the fight. But I also know that these things are 
less than myself — I am greater than the assassin's blow, 
I am greater than the fever germ. I know I have not 
lived for nought ; I have not hoped and believed, loved, 
suffered and striven, seen visions of the glory, fought 
through the storm and endured through the flame; I 
have not done these things without knowing I am 
greater than that which is against me. If you tell me, — 
"There is a God who yet sacrifices the best He has 
made to lesser and contemptible things," then I say "I 
am sorry for that God — the meanest man I have ever 
met is ethically superior to Him." 

Let it once be said there is a God, and why should 
it be thought a thing incredible with you that He 
should raise the dead? Has He made this mighty 
universe only to roll on in its blind unknowingness, 
crushing out the mind which alone can give value to 
it? Surely not! The greatest things will persist, the 
greater will overcome the lesser, life will win out over 



80 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

death. It is the thought of God that makes the dif- 
ference. 

Yet when we think of life beyond the grave it is not 
mere continuity we desire. If the continuance of life 
be only like the present life and no more, who would 
desire it? Paul is not arguing about the resurrection 
in general terms, he is thinking of one sublime figure 
among the sons of men; he is thinking of Jesus Christ. 
His faith and hope is bound up with Him, and really 
I confess that, when I think of a life beyond, the su- 
preme question in my mind is what of Jesus Christ? 
It is not that He stands absolutely alone; I have seen 
some others who were like Him in their measure. I 
have seen, have you not, great brave souls who have 
loved an ideal, striven for it and lost? I have seen, I 
have read of those who stood for the truth amidst flam- 
ing fires and bitter traducings; I have seen human life 
rolling like the billows of the ocean— young, lusty, 
beautiful, promising life — rolling, rolling on, flinging 
itself upon Fate like the wild billows against the cliffs 
of Dover, because every mother's son of them was see- 
ing a vision of a better world, the triumph of the 
Right and the persistence of the True. To me they 
are shadows of that central life among the sons of men 
which has so fastened the eyes of men, gripped their 
consciences and inspired their souls, that central life 
of Jesus Christ. I want to know, in the beyond, what 
about Him? Supreme on earth, will He be supreme 
there? I do not want to define the nature of His 
Being, I do not want to take my tiny cup of understand- 
ing to measure infinity; I only want to know whether 
He who lived the purest life that ever man lived, who 



THE CREDULITY OF INCREDULITY 81 

faced the biggest odds that ever a royal soul faced, who 
went down into the bitterest depths of shame and loss 
into which any man could go, whether, beaten as He 
seemed to me, He shall be triumphant yonder? Are 
the scales always weighted against the great and the 
true; are moral questions always left unsolved; is the 
great soul always the prey of the jungle mind? No! 
If Jesus Christ be raised from the dead, light will 
overcome darkness, right will conquer wrong, mercy 
will endure to the end. When Paul anchored his faith 
in the Christ and believed that He lived, it is no wonder 
that his life was changed, it is no wonder that he 
revalued his values, that he, with his own will, shat- 
tered the accomplishments of his earlier life and went 
out to face the perils of the world because he believed 
in the eternal rather than the temporal, in the true 
rather than the false, caught the spirit of the Christian 
heroism, while his character was changed as those of 
multitudes of others have been changed. 

If you can believe in a God at all, who is not in- 
ferior to yourself, that the holiest aspirations you are 
conscious of are not superior to His, but only sparks 
from the fire of His Being, if there be a God at all 
why should it be incredible that the holiest things you 
know, that you have never dared give expression to 
because they seemed so holy, which you hide in your 
innermost heart, and almost feel a pain when other 
people speak of them, are but the sparks that fly from 
the furnace of His Being? If not, why not? If not, 
what explanation have you got to give without God, 
without a holy God, without a wise God? How do 
you explain yourself, how did you become bigger than 



82 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

your God, how did you become bigger than your 
negation of God? Whence came the effect of which 
you are conscious if the Cause be not the flaming heart 
of Him whose name is Love? 

It is not we Christians who have the incredible thing 
to maintain, it is the incredulous man who is sur- 
rounded by anomalies and perplexed by unsolvable 
problems. It is not mere continuity of life, it is in- 
creasing quality of life for which we crave. 

" 'Tis Life whereof our nerves are scant, 
More Life and fuller that we want." 

And the Christian, like all other mortals, has not an 
absolute truth, yet he has seen the open door, the 
green fields beyond, the illimitable landscape, and the 
throne of the King. He dares to believe he has dis- 
covered resources for heroism, a latent capacity for 
divinity, faith and hope and love, without which the 
world is nought but a wilderness. 

"There's a fancy some lean to and others hate — 
That, when this life is ended, begins 
New work for the soul in another state, 

Where it strives and gets weary, loses and wins : 
Where the strong and the weak, this world's con- 
geries, 
Repeat in large what they practised in small, 
Through life after life in unlimited series: 
Only the scale's to be changed, that's all. 
Yet I hardly know. When a soul has seen 

By the means of Evil that Good is best, 
And, through earth and its noise, what is heaven's 
serene 
When our faith in the same has stood the test — 






THE CREDULITY OF INCREDULITY 83 

Why, the child grown man, you burn the rod, 
The uses of labour are surely done; 

There remaineth a rest for the people of God; 
And I have had troubles enough for one." 

It is not the mere continuity of life, it is increasing 
fulness of life that we assert in the name of Christ. 

"Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face 
to face ; now we know in part, but then shall we know 
even as also we are known." 

Now abideth Faith — challenging, baffling, but not 
incredible ; Hope — denied, deferred, beaten, but not in- 
credible; Love — soiled, stained, lost, broken, but not 
incredible ! 

"Now abideth Faith, Hope, Love, and the greatest 
of these is Love." 



VIII 

TO ALL NATIONS 

TEXT: Luke 24:28. He appeared to be going further, 
and they constrained Him saying, Abide with us for it 
is toward evening and the day is far spent. 

IT is perhaps the most beautiful of the post-resur- 
rection incidents. Only that exquisite story in the 
20th chapter of St. John of the meeting of Jesus 
with Mary Magdalene can compare with it for sheer 
beauty of literary expression. The words of the 
text have become more than familiar to us, they have 
become sacred. It is upon them that one of the most 
beautiful of our hymns has been based. 

"Abide with me, fast falls the eventide 
The darkness deepens, Lord with me abide 
When other helpers fail and comforts flee 
Help of the helpless, O abide with me." 

If Henry Lyte had done nothing else in life but 
write that hymn it would have been worth while for 
him to have lived. Yet beautiful as the hymn is, 
it is in part based upon a misinterpretation of the 
text. Our translation reads, "He made as though He 
would have gone further," which suggests that Jesus 
made pretence of going further waiting to be asked 
to abide. There is no doubt as to the real meaning 

84 



TO ALL NATIONS 85 

in the original record when we come to look at it. 
"He appeared to be going further." He appeared to 
be going further because He was going further, the 
appearance was in accord with the fact, but they con- 
strained Him, saying, "Abide with us." 

It had been dawning upon them though as yet they 
had not put it into words, that He with whom they 
had been conversing was the Master. It seemed as 
though the day were breaking, but to lose Him again 
would seem as though the night had fallen. It was the 
fear of darkness within their hearts that made them 
see its image in nature around them and as they saw 
the red sun sinking to the west they said to Him, 
"Abide with us, for the day is far spent, and the night 
is at hand." 

It is pathetic, though it is exceedingly human to 
notice that the uppermost thought in the minds of 
the disciples after the resurrection, was to restore 
if possible the old associations, to bring Him back to 
them, that He might be with them as before, to have 
once more the sacred fellowships that the cross had 
seemed so ruthlessly to break. That was their first and 
mastering impulse. But Jesus was going further. 
Though He turned on that occasion at their urgent con- 
straining and sat down with them for a while at the 
table, it was only that He might speak peace to their 
hearts and establish their faith, for in the same moment 
that their eyes were opened and they knew Him, He 
vanished out of their sight. He was going further. 

'They did not understand that it was impossible to 
bring Him back. The wonder had been all through 
those marvellous years that He had not as it were taken 



86 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

unto Himself wings and flown away to that realm to 
which He seemed to belong, but when once He had 
broken through it was impossible to bring Him back. 
To have merely resuscitated Jesus, for Him to have 
taken up again the old life with His old friends would 
have been an anti-climax. Once He had broken 
through there was only one thing to do, He must go 
on, and they must learn to worship an invisible Lord. 

You have suffered, many of you, you have had fel- 
lowships broken, you would fain bring back your loved 
ones. Did you ever really try to think it through? 
It cannot be. They would not be just the same. If 
you would continue that thought read again Brown- 
ing's poem "An Epistle, Containing the Strange Medi- 
cal Experience of Karshish the Arab Physician." It 
is written to his old tutor concerning Lazarus whom he 
is supposed to have met after he had risen from the 
dead. You will perceive, as the poet wants you to per- 
ceive, that you cannot push the oak back into the acorn. 
You cannot bring back into the shackles of mortality 
the life that has once broken through. If you did it 
would not be the same life. 

It was with Jesus only as it is with your loved ones. 
He came back to help you to trust. He came back to 
give you added assurance. He came back to make 
credible to us that mystic truth that when we pass on 
into the beyond we are not utterly different from what 
we are here. Even the body plays its part, the spirit- 
ual body is preserved, and they whom we have known 
and loved, are still as we have known and loved. He 
came back to make that credible; He came back to 
whisper it to the heart of the race, but when He had 



TO ALL NATIONS 87 

whispered it, He would not have an anti-climax, — 
in mercy He went on further. 

It was always in His heart to go further. In the 
days of His flesh He was cramped, cabined, confined 
within the limitations of time and space. He was going 
further. He had already come a long way when He 
appeared in Bethlehem. He had come down the ages 
by the Will of God, out of the heart and mind of God. 
He was going on through the ages by the Will of God 
unto the ultimate consummation of the purposes of 
God,- — He was going further. 

You notice in every recorded instance of His return 
to His disciples after the resurrection, there is that ele- 
ment of vanishing. He led them as far as — Bethany. 
Led them back over the old familiar track, led them 
to the little village that was so sacred to them, so fra- 
grant with memories ; — made them to know that Beth- 
any was en route for eternity. He led them as far as 
— Bethany, and then while He blessed them He was 
taken from them. 

Life is like that. We are always being led as far as 
some point or other in life from which we must go on 
alone. You take your baby and lead him as far as 
some point from whence he has to go on alone. You 
teach him to walk. You stand by him while he makes 
his first expedition, his wonderful journey from one 
chair to another. You never forget the day when the 
baby first walked, but the day comes when he must 
walk without you. You lead him as far as school and 
then he passes into other hands besides yours. You 
take him as far as business, and then you say to him, 
I have done what I could to lead you, to establish you, 



88 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

to teach you the right and the wrong, now you must 
go on. You lead him as far as the marriage altar, and 
then you step back and allow new circles of influence 
to be flung around him. You will stand by him as far as 
the evening time of your own life, and then you will 
say, "You must go on, I cannot go with you further." 

Life is a continuous succession of fellowships that 
carry us to a certain point, and then a great crisis 
comes in which we have to make a real step in faith 
and go out into the unknown. Life would not be life 
if it were not like that. Life would be a mere tutelage, 
a mere school-boy's existence if it were not for that. 
You could not make a man that way. You only make 
men by bringing them to the point at which they step 
onward from the known to the unknown. Life itself is 
going further. The heart of man is torn between two 
impulses, the impulse to rest and abide, and the impulse 
to go on alone, to explore. The tragedy of our religious 
history has been just in the conflict between those two 
cravings. So soon as there has been a manifestation of 
the blessing and power .of God, the hearts of the dis- 
ciples say, "Abide with us," — but He is going further. 

The Church has lost step with the race many times 
because she said in her heart, "Abide with us," when 
God was going further. Over and over again you 
can see it down the track of history how God as 
He moved on further and led the race with Him 
has seemed to be breaking up the old associations, 
has left men's hearts in fear, has left them when the 
sun was setting and the evening shadows were wrap- 
ping them round, and they have tried to constrain God 
saying unto Him, "Abide with us." 



TO ALL NATIONS 89 

And the secret is, you cannot have an abiding God 
unless you let Him go further. An abiding God is 
a stagnant God, an abiding experience is a stagnant ex- 
perience. God is marching on, march on with Him. 
He leads you as far as — Bethany. Never lose touch 
with the historic; never lose touch with the historic 
Jesus I beg of you. If you do your house will fall 
about you like a house of cards. Keep close to the 
historic Jesus but perceive that He is going further. 

Our fathers used to talk a great deal about the con- 
flict between Science and Religion. There is no con- 
flict. Science is Religion, and true Religion is Science. 
Whatever is true is of God. If it seems to break up 
your conventional religion, so much the worse for your 
conventional religion. Get square with the truth! 

Time was in the days of those who are older in the 
congregation when the minds of many religious men 
quailed before the evolutionary conception of life. We 
do not quail now, but our fathers did. 

There is a story told of how Huxley was once ad- 
dressing a meeting when a certain Bishop whose name 
I shall not mention was in the chair. He was facetious, 
glib, eloquent, and turning upon Huxley he said, — 
"Was it on your grandfather's or your grand- 
mother's side that you descended from a monkey?" 
Huxley remained silent and when his turn came to 
speak spoke quietly, and reasonably about the truth 
as he saw it, but in one sentence towards the end 
he said, — "I should not be ashamed to have a monkey 
for an ancestor, but I should be ashamed to be con- 
nected with a man who used great gifts to obscure 
the truth." That was a well deserved retort. Do not 



90 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

obscure -the truth, and especially do not obscure it in 
the name of God for that is blasphemy. Get square 
with the truth so far as you may know the truth. Be- 
lieve that God is going further, go with Him. Walk 
with Him so far -as Bethany. Plant your feet in the 
sacred soil, kneel with reverence before the places upon 
this old earth where His foot-prints were made visible, 
but do not try to tie God down to those points in space 
and those moments in history. 

The time will come yet when we shall discover 
that one of the principal elements in vital religion is 
constructive courage, and when we have made that dis- 
covery we shall begin to shorten the distance between 
the Christ and ourselves. 

Begin at Jerusalem, He said, but preach the Gospel 
to all nations. Go ye into all the world and preach 
the Gospel, that is the glad tidings, to # every creature. 

St. Francis of Assisi was simple enough or wise 
enough to believe that that even included the brute 
creation. Legend says that he preached to the birds 
and the wild beasts, addressing the wolf as Brother 
Wolf. That may have been a little bit of extremism 
on the part of a sweet saint of God, but it was infinitely 
nearer the truth than the blind brutality of men who 
brush the dumb creation out of their way as though 
it had no relationship to God at all. 

March on with the risen Christ ! While you do not 
lose touch with the past, at least see to it that the past 
does not shackle you, and remember that you only 
secure a position of abiding when you recognise that 
He is going further. 

I wanted on this last night that I should speak to 



TO ALL NATIONS 91 

you for a time to have made another appeal on behalf 
of the famine stricken people of Russia. I know how 
your minds have been clouded by certain political' hap- 
penings and developments generally in Genoa. I know 
that we are apt to forget the sombre human tragedy 
of hunger and of death amidst the tangle and the 
shif tings of our diplomacies, but I tell you diplomacy is 
a gossamer web in the face of great human tragedies 
like that. You should brush them aside, get down to 
the solid bed-rock of humanity and know in your 
hearts that no sophistry and no political entanglements 
have a right to come between your consciousness and 
the grim fact that multitudes are starving. 

Do you know, I think we were never so splendid as 
in war, and we have never been so mean as in peace. I 
will tell you why it was. When victory came to us we 
said, "Abide with us," we sought to constrain it, put 
ramparts around it and hold it as it were lest it should 
elude our grasp. We did not know that Christ was 
going further and that the only way to victory was the 
way forward to brotherhood. We said to victory, 
"Abide with us," and we lost it. We lost it, so far at 
least, because we were not courageous enough or faith- 
ful enough. 

For my part, when I read the other day that at 
Genoa, Germany and Russia which comprise between 
them some two hundred millions of the inhabitants of 
this Continent, by far the greatest number of them, by 
far the hungriest of them; had agreed that they would 
wipe out the past as it stood between them and set in 
motion again the wheels of industry so that the hungry 
might be fed, and the naked clothed, I said in my 



92 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

heart, "God speed them." I do not like everything 
about the method, I perceive the cynicism, the subtlety, 
the brutality perhaps of the way in which it was done, 
but I also perceive that the saving of the dying, the 
feeding of the hungry, the clothing of the naked are 
rational things to do. If we have failed to do it all 
these three or four years, thank God at least they are 
beginning to do it. What in fact did we do ? We said 
to Germany, Stay outside ! We said to Russia, We do 
not approve of your methods, starve! but stay outside. 
Let victory abide with us. And our victory has cor- 
roded and we are stagnant people. 

I read in the paper this week the worst thing I have 
read yet concerning Britain. This is how it reads : — 

" 'Scores of babies are being offered every week to 
the National Children Adoption Society, 19 Sloane 
Street, S. W., by mothers whose only reason is that 
they find it impossible either to get work or accom- 
modation as long as they keep .their children. .The 
thousands of mothers who apply to us to take their 
children are of an excellent type. Nothing but in- 
ability to support their children would induce them to 
part with them.' Miss Clara Andrew, founder and 
director of the Association, told a Daily Mail reporter 
yesterday, 'I get them here every day pleading to give 
away their children, whom they really love and wish to 
keep. There was a case the other day of a young 
couple living in a single room to whom a baby came 
to add to their already hard plight. The husband, an 
ex-service man, and the wife, were both strong and 
healthy, but neither could get any work. Another 
young couple said they could get an excellent joint 
post in the country if some one would take their child. 
Many mothers have asked us to take the youngest of 



TO ALL NATIONS 93 

several children, that they could "board out" the others 
and be free to go to work and keep the home to- 
gether/ Miss Andrew added that it was impossible 
to cope with the numbers offered." 

This in Christian England, — and it is because in the 
main I venture to say, we said to victory, crass ma- 
terial victory, a victory of superior armaments, and 
superior numbers, "Abide with us." The World-Re- 
deemer would have gone on further, but we were 
afraid of the dark and sought the old familiar place 
of refuge. We have come to the stage apparently, 
when in Christian England its own fathers and 
mothers give away their children because there are no 
homes for children in England and there is no work for 
people who must have children with them. 

I say that is the saddest thing I have read yet con- 
cerning this dear island home of ours. That is the 
hand-writing on the wall, that is the knocking of the 
hand of God against our solid respectability and our 
stubborn self-righteousness. That is the call of God, 
who despises your spurious triumphs and calls to you 
for the human note that is made manifest in the Man 
Christ Jesus whose name we have taken these two 
thousand years, but whom we dare not follow. 

Mammon ! What hast thou done, thou slayer of 
men, thou slayer of little children ? O Mammon, thou 
that comest in all the panoply of might ! Could a man 
but go out against thee as David went with a sling and 
a stone ! I sling the stone at thee, thou cruel monster ! 

1 appeal for the flowing of the tides of human sym- 
pathy and brotherhood, mercy and truth, and those 



94 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

things that are akin to the Man Christ Jesus. He bore 
the tragedy of this old world on his heart and died 
that He might conquer. Some day I say again, we 
shall discover that constructive courage is one of the 
supreme Christian virtues. Some day we shall storm 
the hearts of virile men and women with a Gospel 
that is all athrob with a redeeming love for humanity. 

He is going further. If we do not go with Him, He 
may pass over from us to some other race. The pub- 
licans and the harlots He said in His own day, crowded 
into the Kingdom of God before the righteous. They 
resented it as we may resent other nations against 
whom we harbour bitter feelings crowding along the 
way of commonsense while we hang back. He is no 
respecter of persons! If we will not clothe the naked, 
feed the hungry, save the dying, He is going further ! 

I beseech you young men and women I I am not 
speaking morbidly to-night. I have a kind of sub- 
conscious feeling that I am speaking my last message 
to you for some time, but I feel I am coming back in a 
few short weeks, — it is not that I am depressed, but I 
believe with John Wesley that a man should always 
preach as if he were preaching for the last time. Get 
down to the things that really matter, I beseech you. 
Young men and women, hold fast by the historic Jesus, 
the Man who lived in Galilee, the despised, the rejected 
One, but the Man in whom all the great things root 
and from whom all the sweet flowers spring. Hold 
fast by the historic Jesus and when you have laid hold 
of Him turn and face the future in the courage of His 
presence with the impulse of His Spirit and go on with 
Him! go on with Him! to somehow make your life 



TO ALL NATIONS 95 

and influence tell for the humanising of the world, for 
the equalising of the scales of justice for the bringing 
of men nearer to God, and if it sometimes seems as 
if the sun is setting, do not doubt the final triumph of 
the Christ. 

"Say not the struggle nought availeth, 
The labour and the wounds are vain, 
The enemy faints not, nor faileth, 
And as things have been they remain. 

"If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars; 
It may be in yon smoke concealed, 
Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers 
And, but for you, possess the field. 

"For while the tired waves, vainly breaking, 
Seem here no painful inch to gain 
Far back, through creeks and inlets making, 
Comes silent, flooding in, the main: 

"And not by eastern windows only, 
When daylight comes, comes in the light; 
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly! 
But westward, look, the land is bright I" 

He is going further, let us march with Him. 



IX 

GOING BEYOND JESUS 

TEXT: John 2:8-9. Look to yourselves, that ye lose not 
the things which we have wrought, but that ye receive a 
full reward. Whosoever goeth onward and abideth not 
in the teaching of Christ, hath not God; he that abideth 
in the teaching, the same hath both the Father and the 
Son. 

HERE is a little letter which looks as if it might 
have been written hastily in some spare and 
sunny afternoon hour. It consists only of thirteen 
verses as it stands in our copy of the Scriptures. It 
is by no means an exhaustive letter. It was appar- 
ently written by a man who thought it scarcely neces- 
sary to write at all, because he expected very shortly 
to stand face to face with the person to whom he was 
writing. But he had a feeling that he might be de- 
layed, or else it was a long while since he had last 
written, and it might be well if he sent just these few 
lines in case his visit should be deferred longer than 
he anticipated. 

"Having many things to write unto you, I would 
not write them with paper and ink, but I hope to come 
unto you and speak face to face, that your joy may be 
fulfilled." 

Nothing could well be more casual, less formal, than 
this brief message which believers for twenty cen- 

96 



GOING BEYOND JESUS 97 

turies have counted as part of the inspired word of 
God. 

But the very fact that this fragmentary note became 
bound up in the canon of the Scripture has invested 
it with tremendous importance. The Bible has meant 
more to the human race than any other book — it has 
been translated into almost every tongue. Men have 
sought for ancient manuscripts with more eagerness 
than a diamond-seeker seeks for diamonds or a mer- 
chant for goodly pearls. Enough books have been 
written upon these thirteen verses to form a library by 
themselves. The student of the Bible, for the mere 
sake of satisfying himself that he has mastered the 
literature of his subject, is compelled to spend many 
hours in attempting to decide questions of authorship, 
or of date, or of destination, to say nothing of delicate, 
critical questions concerning the precise meaning of 
words. There is of course a charm about this kind 
of study and no one really begrudges it. At the same 
time one often has a feeling that such a man as he 
who wrote this brief message might have been very 
surprised had he been informed concerning the keen 
criticism, the endless questions and the mountains of 
literature which were to be built upon it. Who, for 
instance, was the "elect lady" and her children to 
whom the author wrote, or indeed was she "a lady at 
all, or is the expression, as some have suggested, 
merely a poetic title for a communion of saints in 
the early time? Was the writer really John, he of 
the Twelve, or was he the Presbyter John or some 
other? Is he the same as he who wrote the fourth 
Gospel; and are the first and the third of the three 



98 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

Epistles also to be traced to his hand? Here are nice 
critical questions which might keep the student busy 
for several years. It is all an illustration of what 
usually happens when the minds of men are concen- 
trated for long periods even upon the simplest fact. 
Questions will be started, doubts will be suggested, ex- 
planations will be advanced, which, in their turn, re- 
quire further explanations. One begins to wonder 
sometimes whether anything would remain stable if 
subjected to the constant play of thoughts and words. 
Where there are many tongues, there is sure to be at 
least some confusion of tongues. Perhaps the truth 
is that it is the things we talk least about that abide. 

Really it does seem as if this brief letter was origin- 
ally writen to one of those good and gracious women 
who have always been found in the heart of every 
communion of believing folk. Some Countess of 
Huntingdon, as it were, in the ancient time, unknown 
by name, preserved only to memory by the fact that 
this letter was written to her by so important a person 
as John. One who reigned in her own home like a 
queen and whose children followed in her pious steps. 
One whose hospitable door was ever open to the Chris- 
tian folk of her day, whether the local people, who 
worshipped at the same meeting, or the travelling folk, 
who constantly shared her hospitality on their way 
from one town to another. 

And it does seem also as if this letter was penned 
by that same John, who in the days of his youth had 
kept company with the Christ, and whose affectionate 
nature and trustworthy character had both sought and 



GOING BEYOND JESUS 99 

been granted the privilege of leaning his head upon 
Jesus' breast as they supped. 

And now he is an old man, full of grace and tender- 
ness, yet with unshaken convictions, which he holds 
with more conscious tenacity and, maybe, with that 
slight tinge of fear which comes so naturally to the 
old, who feel that life is slipping away from them 
and that new forces are in operation in the world. 

Quite evidently it is an old man who is writing 
this letter. It is not merely that he calls himself 
"the elder," which might either be an official title in 
the Church, or might simply mean that he had reached 
that period in life when old people like to remind others 
of the many winters which have added their snow to 
their heads. Every touch reveals this quality of ven- 
erableness. He is interested in the children of this 
elect lady ; he has watched them grow, no doubt, even 
from infancy; he still calls them children, though, 
maybe, they have reached mature years. He speaks in 
terms of simple affection, which are characteristic of 
the friendship which has been long tried and has passed 
through its summer into its rich autumn. He is naively 
sure that, when he pays his long intended visit, this 
old and tried friend will receive him with joy. 

There is yet a more sure indication of age in the 
revelation of his fear concerning the advanced thought 
of certain people who are troubling the minds of the 
believers of his generation. "Many deceivers," says 
he, "are gone forth into the world." "Look to your- 
selves." 

What is it that one would expect the aged John 
to be most sensitive about? What truth would he be 



100 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

likely to hold as most precious? What opponent 
would be likely to call forth such sharp words as 
these from so gentle a spirit, — "This is the deceiver 
and the anti-christ" ? Why, naturally, if we know 
anything about human nature at all, what would stir 
him most deeply or rouse him most intensely would 
be any attack, open or secret, upon the grandeur of 
Jesus Christ. Think what Christ meant to John — 
what He had meant in those three rich years of close 
fellowship, what He had meant in those long sub- 
sequent years of active ministry and rich success in the 
ingathering of souls; what He meant now, when the 
shadows of the evening were falling and the old apostle 
looked back in the track of the slanting rays of the 
sun at the sheaves that lay upon the harvest field. 
Whosoever by so much as a syllable would detract 
from the glory of that Christ would touch this aged 
man to the quick. 

And we know from other sources that such attacks 
were being made ; they always had been made, in fact. 
From the very beginning there had been the attacks of 
unbelievers, the calumnies of hostile Jews, the sar- 
casms of unconvinced Gentiles. But we know also 
that there were far more insidious attacks being de- 
livered by Christ's professed friends. There was the 
Gnostic insinuation that Christ was not a real person, 
but a mere phantom through whom God revealed Him- 
self. Fancy telling John that Jesus was a phantom! 
He .whose head had lain upon His breast, and in whose 
ears the voice of the Christ had been like the music 
of the spheres. No wonder that, even in this scrap 
of an epistle, written in his old age, some hint of 



GOING BEYOND JESUS 101 

that thunder is heard which, in the days of his youth, 
had caused him to be known as "Boanerges," the Son 
of Thunder. 

And, besides, his intuition was right. The follow- 
ing centuries, which were hidden from him, but are 
clear to us, have demonstrated that Christ is central to 
the Christian faith. It .is built upon Him, like a 
temple upon a rock; it is united to Him, like the 
branches to the vine; it is vitalised by Him, as the 
Head among the members. If Jesus Christ had been 
overthrown or explained away, or merely relegated to 
the common Pantheon in the days of John, or later, 
we should not be here to-day, and that long triumphant 
tale of the victories of the Christ would never have 
been told. 

It must be that such things will happen again and 
again. It is impossible that one should take such a 
commanding place in the vanguard of human experi- 
ence, as has been assigned to Jesus Christ, without the 
fierce fires of criticism burning around Him and the 
most pointed, stabbing enquiries being made. It must 
be always as it has been in the past, as it shall be 
again and again in the future, that the mind of the 
aged and the mind of the young will come into con- 
flict concerning the Christ. This is no sign of His 
decline, but a sign of His vitality. We need never 
dread questions concerning Him. If there be any- 
thing to dread it is the silence that hovers over in- 
difference. 

But we may well pause and reflect upon John's 
words in the midst of our crisis. We may take a look 
backward and also a look forward. "Look to your- 



102 THE' CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

selves that ye lose not the things which we have 
wrought." 

Just think for a moment what has been wrought in 
the name of the Divine Christ. Would you dare to 
say to what point the human race would by now have 
attained had it not been for Him? Our progress, it 
seems at times to us, has been slow enough. In days 
like our own we may be tempted to ask disparagingly 
whether there has been any progress at all, but have 
we no vision for the depths into which we might have 
been plunged without the magic of this Divine Name 
and the leverage of this Divine Personality? We 
have gone too far even to dream of undermining the 
foundations of the Christian faith. So beautiful has 
been this story, so marvellous its unfolding, so potent 
has it been to kindle the purest flames of nobility of 
character, so fragrant is it with the prayers of men, so 
intimately entwined with our poetry and art and 
science and philanthropy, so rich in faith and hope 
and love, that if, by. any diabolical ingenuity of thought 
or fatal perversity of heart, the Christ could be dis- 
lodged from the pinnacle of His splendour and hurled 
down into the limbo of forgotten gods and ideals, how 
would this old world ever trust again? 

"Look to yourselves," lest not by thought, but by 
want of thought, not by desire but by wrong desire, 
we lose the things that men such as John have wrought. 
Conjure up in your minds the vision of the men and 
women of faith who have wrought in His name. Hear 
again the message of history and not the least the 
history of this our own land; see for yourselves how 
its institutions and its laws, ay, and its very stones 



GOING BEYOND JESUS 103 

are involved in Him, and at least look to yourselves 
lest we lose the things that they have wrought. 

But must we not advance in thought ? Can the world 
live on a faith which not only does not change, but 
must be stated in formulas which do not change ? 

"Advanced thought!" There is no terror in that 
word. We must either advance in thought or stagnate. 
The Christ challenges us to advance. Our thought is 
far behind the chaos to which our practice has brought 
us, but at least consider whether this "going onward," 
as John calls it, is worth while if it takes us out of 
our abiding in the teaching of the Christ. So often in 
the past the world has had to find its way back from 
its advanced thought to take refuge again in the teach- 
ing of the Christ. So often men and nations have 
found that, though they had what they called "ad- 
vanced thought," they had not God. 

This is not to call you back to stereotyped modes 
of expression ; this is not to bind the throbbing pulses 
of to-day with the cerements of dead yesterdays. This 
is to ask you that, with all your hard and advanced 
thinking, you never forget that, except ye abide in that 
purity and truth and piety where Christ dwelt continu- 
ally, ye have not God. This is to remind you that, 
though there have been many changes throughout the 
centuries, yet the unbroken testimony of those who 
abode in the teaching of Christ is that they have kept 
both the Father and the Son. 

The world itself, like John, is growing old. We 
know not how many centuries lie yet within the womb 
of the future waiting still to be born, but, when we 
look back over the vista of the past, recalling its his- 



104 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

tory, watching its long struggle upward for the things 
of the Kingdom of God, we are called upon, even if we 
are young and life is throbbing in our temples and 
surging in our veins, to remember the things that 
have been wrought, to hesitate lest we turn away from 
them, and rather to give ourselves to them with re- 
newed consecration, that we may carry on nearer to 
its completion that great and wondrous city of the 
living God which Jesus Christ made vivid and real 
in the minds of men — the city whose builder and maker 
is God, the foundation of which is truly laid, but whose 
radiating streets and half -built towers yet wait the 
contribution of our hands and our hearts. 

I would claim for the Christ, and those who have 
followed Him throughout the centuries, that, just at a 
time like this, when for failure to follow Him we are 
reeling upon the very edge of chaos, we, because of not 
"looking to ourselves," or because of a so-called ' 'ad- 
vanced thought" of the kind which is mere vague 
theory divorced from deepest fact, should not, in our 
measure, suffer this long-tried and blood-bought hu- 
manity to "lose its full reward." 






HOW FAITH GROWS 

TEXT: John 5:46. For if ye believed Moses, ye would 
believe Me ; for he wrote of Me. 

WE are very apt, when we read these sayings 
of the Master, to skim off quickly their sur- 
face meaning, turning away with unenquiring mind, 
satisfied that we have understood what He said, which 
is to say we have missed His meaning altogether. For 
His meaning seldom lay upon the surface, and never 
lay entirely there ; the centuries have been plumbing the 
meaning of Christ's words and have not bottomed 
them yet. Thus, when we read a passage like this : — 

'Tor if ye believed Moses, ye would believe Me; 
for he wrote of Me," 

we are apt to think that the key to its meaning lies in 
the last clause. We ask ourselves, "What did Moses 
write of Him?" and then there comes to our minds 
that classic passage, in Deuteronomy xviii:i5, read 
this morning: — 

"The Lord thy God will raise up unto thee a Prophet 
from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me ; 
unto Him shall ye hearken"; 

105 



106 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

and we say to ourselves, "Yes, He was blaming them 
because they did not remember this passage which 
Moses had written, and apply it to Himself. ,, But 
would not that have been a very hard test to make? 
Was it not rather much to expect that they should re- 
member one passage like that, which had lain in these 
ancient books all the centuries, and that they should 
have had the spiritual insight and mental acumen to 
apply it to Jesus, and to see beneath the apparent 
differences the fundamental unity that there was be- 
tween Moses and Himself? I think that would have 
been a very hard test to make, and a very severe con- 
demnation, if that had been all the Master had meant. 
But we must look deeper. 

You notice, first of all, that He threw doubt upon 
the thing they were most sure of. "IF ye believed 
Moses !" Why, Moses was the centre of their thought, 
the centre of their life, the centre of their nation, the 
centre of their religion. If there was one thing they 
were sure of it was that they believed Moses. But 
Jesus said, "IF ye believed Moses" ; for .there are no 
beliefs we need to scrutinise more carefully than those 
we are so sure we hold that we never question them. 

Sir Oliver Lodge has told us that there are fish 
which are unconscious of the water. They are the 
fish which live where the water is deepest, but it is 
so deep that no current ever disturbs them, no tempest 
ever startles them. They live where it is water always, 
and he suggests that they are unconscious of their 
element, just as we are unconscious of the air until 
it blows, grows hot or grows cold. So there are 
many things we are so sure we believe that we never 



HOW FAITH GROWS 107 

question themf and maybe these are the beliefs which 
influence our lives the least. 

The Master was also suggesting to them that they 
looked back upon Moses, but did not look forward 
with him. Moses "wrote," He said. Men write be- 
cause they want to perpetuate something they feel is 
slipping out of their grasp; they write for the future; 
it is their appeal to the ages. Moses wrote, but they 
had been looking back upon Moses instead of looking 
forward with him. They kept on looking back upon 
Moses until their backward look stopped their prog- 
ress and their growth; they were fettered by Moses 
instead of being inspired by him. 

Now Moses himself, like all men of faith, had the 
forward look. His very life was a symbol of un- 
finished things. He had dedicated himself to the 
bringing of these people into the Promised Land, but 
he only saw that land with his eyes, the sole of his 
foot never trod upon it. He left the people, to whom 
He had given his life, upon the wrong side of the 
river, and died upon the mountain-top — a pathetic 
symbol of things unfinished. 

You cannot read the writings of Moses, especially 
those that are attributed to him in the Book of Deu- 
teronomy, without feeling the pathos of this forward- 
looking man. He is trying to legislate for a land 
into which he is not entering, and into which he never 
will enter. He is trying to draw out of the treasure 
of the past those principles that will guide his people 
when his voice has become silent and he has lain down 
in the dust to die. 

All men of faith are men of the forward look. 



108 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

Recall to your mind that great classic chapter, the 
nth of Hebrews, and think of those great souls who 
pass as it were across the stage before us. They are 
men who have not attained, only they have seen. They 
pass before us with a far-away look that is not of the 
past, but of the future. The tragedy of Faith is that 
we so often lock it up in the past. We speak of the 
Faith that was once committed to the saints, and then 
we gather round it as if we would keep it intact and 
forbid any impious hand to rest even for a moment 
upon it. We forget that faith is only rooted in the 
past; it is a living thing which grows on into the 
future. A faith that is only backward-looking is a 
faith that is cramped and perishing. 

They had been looking back upon Moses for cen- 
turies, and all the time Moses had written and ap- 
pealed to the future. They had no vision for the 
future, but only for the past. Faith, as I have said, 
is an organic thing. You look at an acorn ; you know 
there is the potency for an oak tree about that acorn. 
The oak tree is not in the acorn, but the power is in 
the acorn to gather the oak tree. By and by it will 
stretch out its hands into the air, and up towards the 
sky, and take in with its invisible fingers the oak tree 
that is there about it. It will gather it within and 
weave it together with its mystic chemistry, but it is 
not the oak tree itself which is in the acorn, but only 
the power to gather it in out of air and soil. 

If they had believed Moses, they would have be- 
lieved all those other prophets who had come in the 
spirit of Moses. But Jesus had to say to them more 
than once, and once he said it with tears : — 



HOW FAITH GROWS 109 

"Which of the prophets have not your fathers per- 
secuted?'' 

"Ye build the sepulchres of the prophets, and gar- 
nish the tombs of the righteous, and say, 'If we had 
been in the days of our fathers, we should not have 
been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets, 
wherefore ye bear witness against yourselves.' " 

All the great prophets, who had come to them in the 
spirit of Moses, they had rejected. With their back- 
ward look toward Moses, they cast out Elijah, they 
slew Isaiah, they imprisoned Jeremiah. They had 
made the prophets, who had come in the spirit of 
Moses, to live in dens and caves of the earth, and now 
had they not slain John the Baptist, last of the line 
to come in the spirit of Moses, and were they not 
rejecting Him who said, "I came not to destroy, but 
to fulfil"? 

A living faith must have affinity with all that is 
cognate and related to it. A living faith should never 
be shut up; it should go out into life like the seed goes, 
to gather into itself all that is native to it. 

Now we stand, roughtly speaking, about as far 
away from Christ as Christ Himself stood from 
Moses. We have passed out of the Jewish dispensa- 
tion into the Christian dispensation, but we are still 
just as human as they were, and we have been per- 
petuating very largely the same mistakes. We have 
been thinking that we believed certain things, and it is 
those beliefs above all things that need to be chal- 
lenged and are being challenged. We have been talk- 
ing about the Christian faith as they talked about the 
faith of Moses, as though it were a thing that was 



110 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

planted away in the past to be preserved intact and 
to be made credible to men, that thus they might 
look back over the mists of the centuries and feel sure 
that God came into human life in the person of Christ 
Jesus. We have looked too much to the past and not 
enough to the future. It is a great thing to believe 
that Jesus lay in the cradle at Bethlehem, but that is 
only to believe that the acorn lies in the soil. The 
great thing to believe is that the oak tree will come, 
and that out of the cradle at Bethlehem will come 
the great things of the ages. Our faith is not vital 
unless it is looking rather to the future, though sure 
enough of its past; not divorced from its past, but 
challenging and appropriating the days that are to 
come. 

Over and over again we have seen that, though our 
fathers have professed to believe in Jesus, they have 
not believed in those who came in the spirit of Jesus. 

If our fathers had believed in Jesus, they would 
have believed in Savonarola. There were faults about 
Savonarola. There were limitations of knowledge, 
there was a mixture of religion with politics which was 
not good, there was a clinging element of superstition 
— he had not disentangled himself from all the magic 
and supernaturalism of the middle ages, but he was a 
man of Christ, he came to plead for the Kingdom of 
Christ, he came to call men back to Christ, and our 
fathers, who thought they believed in Christ, hanged 
and burned Savonarola. We know quite well they 
were wrong. They should have welcomed him. If 
they saw certain defects in him, certain mistakes he 
made, they should have tried to set the mistakes right, 



HOW FAITH GROWS 111 

not kill the man whom the anomalies had made 
desperate. 

If our fathers had believed in Jesus, they would 
have believed in Martin Luther. He was not in- 
fallible; how could he be, trained as he had been in 
the seclusion of a monastery, guileless, unpractical 
son of man, flung out suddenly where great things 
were afoot, made in spite of himself the centre of a 
new order, the changing form of which he had not 
truly envisaged? But if the Pope of that day had 
believed in Jesus, he would not have sent his Bull to 
excommunicate Luther; he might have sent a Bull to 
excommunicate John Tetzel, and to stop the infamous 
practice which drove this sincere monk desperate. 

If our fathers had believed in Jesus, they would 
have believed in John Wesley. He was trying to reach 
people whom the Church was not reaching. He was 
going out with the love of God in his heart, speaking 
in the open, at the mouths of coalpits, to men whose 
faces were marked with the tears that rolled down 
their begrimed cheeks, to tell them of the love of 
God. Our fathers, who were so sure they believed in 
Jesus, were afraid that John Wesley was upsetting 
things. What was going to happen if these new forces 
were let loose in the Church? Sure that they believed 
in Jesus, they stood with their backs to the sun and 
said at last, "Away with this man!" The ages know 
perfectly well that they were wrong. This man had 
brought a new vision; he came upon a fresh tide of 
the Grace of God. 

If our fathers had believed in Jesus, they would 
have believed in William Booth, for he came in the 



112 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

spirit of Jesus. It is true he came with drums and 
trumpets, and tambourines and other queer things 
which shocked people's conventions. It is true he 
brought drunkards into the Church, and harlots; it is 
true that the undiscerning mob stoned him in the 
streets. Our fathers, who were so sure they believed 
in Jesus, tried to silence this man, but the ages know 
they were wrong. It was their faith rather than his 
that was weak; it was their faith that was sterile, 
while his was vital; it was their faith that was buried 
in the soil of the past, it was his faith that was reach- 
ing out like the branches and leaves of the tree, to 
absorb what was present in the future. 

I will come closer home. li we had believed in 
Jesus, we should have believed in Woodrow Wilson. 
"Ah! now," you say, "you are coming upon contro- 
versial ground. We will agree with you when you talk 
about our fathers who are dead. We will garnish 
the graves of the prophets.' , You are thinking pos- 
sibly of the many things that have been said about 
Woodrow Wilson, of his personal limitations, of his 
autocratic spirit, of his inexperience among the diplo- 
mats of old Europe, of the impracticability of his 
fourteen points and the unreadiness of the world to 
receive them. Yes, — that is what they said about 
Savonarola; that is what they said about Luther and 
Wesley and Booth ; that is what they always say. No 
prophet has ever been flawless and impeccable. What 
the ages want to know is whether he had the truth in 
him. I am no prophet, nor the son of a prophet, but 
I venture to suggest that fifty years from now they 
will look back to our time and say, "That man had 



HOW FAITH GROWS US 

the truth; his fourteen points were perhaps ahead of 
his time, maybe it was too much to expect that they 
should have been accepted all at once, but those men 
who set themselves to put the blood-rusted key of the 
past into the portal of the future at Paris were wrong, 
and he was right." 

If the Christian Church had believed in Jesus, it 
would not have been brow-beaten by accusations that 
Wilson's scheme was idealistic, impracticable, that he 
did not know the inwardness of politics, that these 
things could not be because they had not been before. 
If we Christians had really believed in Jesus, we would 
have said, "This is right and this way will we go 
and not that, and if our generation passes before the 
goal is reached, this way will we still go and our 
children will follow after us." It was our faith that 
was defective; it was that we did not sufficiently believe 
in Jesus, for I hold that belief in Jesus is the most 
assimilating thing in the world. I have no longer 
any patience with that kind of faith in Jesus that is 
divorced from the actual world in which we are living. 
To me it seems that the tragedy of the Church is that 
so often she has had her back to the light ; that to every 
new challenge that has come to her she has said, "No, 
no, that will disturb the established order"; she has 
turned her back to the sun; she has wanted to con- 
serve what was in the past. You do not conserve the 
acorn; you plant it and let it grow! 

As I understand the truth that is in Jesus, there is 
no real truth anywhere that cannot be assimilated to 
it. It is the most daring thing in this world. It is a 
religion of heroes; if we have made it a religion of 



114 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

monks, so much the worse for us all. The Christian 
religion is a religion for brave men and women, — its 
roots are there in the past as a pledge of its appeal 
in the future, and every good thing that is worth be- 
lieving finds Jesus Christ at the end of the road. 

May I ask you what you do believe? Let us get 
down to solid fact. You say, "I believe in manliness. ,, 
Yes, if you do believe in manliness, you will believe in 
Jesus. You say, "I believe in Truth, that a man should 
speak the truth though the heavens fall." If you do 
believe in truth, by what right can you refuse to believe 
in Jesus? "I believe in purity," you say, — Well, if 
you believe in purity, you will believe in Jesus. "Ah, 
but," you say, "I have mental difficulties concerning 
Jesus." That is not surprising; He would be a strange 
Christ to challenge the ages who did not provoke men- 
tal difficulties; He would be a strange god-like being 
if it were easy to understand Him. It is not that, nay, 
if you were to go so far as to say, "I have doubts 
as to the historicity of Jesus," I would not let you go. 
I would say, "But somehow He is there, if not in the 
flesh, He is yet there ; He is there in ideal ; He is there 
in the minds of men, in the response of the human soul. 
By what right will you reject Him?" All true roads 
lead to Jesus. All true faith is an assimilating thing ; 
it builds upon itself, it gathers to itself, and the only 
valid faith is the faith that is always growing. 

To me He is not only historical, He is Divine. To 
me He sounds the key-note of life, He makes the uni- 
verse throb with melody, He slays every base and 
ignoble thing; He is the promise of the dawn, He is 
the assurance of the glory of God. 



HOW FAITH GROWS 115 

'So, through the clouds of Calvary — there shines 
His face, and I believe that evil dies, 
And good lives on, loves, on, and conquers all — 
All War must end in Peace. These clouds are lies. 
They cannot last. The blue sky is the Truth. 
For God is Love. Such is my Faith, I have 
My reasons for it, and I find them strong 
Enough. And you? You want to argue? Well, 
I can't. It is a choice. I choose the Christ. ,, 






XI 

GOD IS LIGHT 

TEXT: John (first epistle general) 1:7. God is Light . . . 
if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have 
fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus 
His Son cleanseth us from all sin. 

THAT is a very old-fashioned text. I suppose 
there are many thousands of ministers stand- 
ing up in London at this moment just about to an- 
nounce their text. I wonder how many of them have 
announced a text of that kind. There is a clause in 
it which is supposed to be unacceptable to-day. It 
seems to bring with it associations which are no longer 
palatable, which are said to have no force. For my 
part I believe that there is nothing more vitally neces- 
sary to religion just now than the re-reading of those 
old and sacred and drastic passages which are found 
in the Bible. The religion that is purged of those 
is an emasculated thing and could never win the world. 

I do not know how to preach this text except in a 
somewhat auto-biographical way, I have tried to find 
another way and cannot, so I hope you will pardon 
the seeming impertinence of such a method. 

I was brought up in a very rigid, old-fashioned 
theological school. I was growing up as a boy in the 
days when the evangelical movement had not spent its 
force, when Spurgeon, Parker and Liddon were the 

116 



GOD IS LIGHT 117 

outstanding preachers in London, when Moody and 
jSankey were revered as God's honoured servants and 
when in our Churches we sang Sankey's hymns with 
their frequent allusions to the blood of Jesus. There 
was one hymn which may be said to have been 
typical : — 

"Jesus paid it all, 
All to Him I owe, 
Sin had left a crimson stain 
He washed it white as snow/* 

In my later teens there came a spiritual impulse 
which transformed my life. I believe when that in- 
fluence comes, it most often comes in our teens, in the 
days of youth's high heroism when we are prone to 
strike the noblest key of our life. It was in those 
days that a great spiritual impulse came to me. I 
accepted the forms of thought which were prevalent 
in my home and my surroundings. They appealed to 
me and helped me for a time. They enabled me to in- 
terpret the spiritual impulse which had come to me; 
they made my heart throb with the sense of a great 
divine love and of a great and sacred purpose in life. 
But I think it was not very long before it became dimly 
apparent to me that I had been born in a changing 
age, when one wave of thought had almost spent itself 
and another was sweeping over the world. I found 
there were many departments of my life that my re- 
ligion had not touched very deeply. It had not taken 
out of my heart and mind my prejudices. It was 
many a long year before I grew tolerant towards 
a Roman Catholic. It was many a long year 
before I could be anything else but a Britisher. I 



118 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

was as ardent in my belief in the British race as 
any Jew could have been in his faith concerning 
the peculiar people. There was a considerable period 
when I believed that the British race represented the 
lost ten tribes and the great promises of the old Book 
were fulfilled among us as a people. I went into busi- 
ness and wanted to become rich. I was not conscious 
of anything in my religion that prevented my doing so. 
I believed in being industrious, earnest and mastering 
the duties of one's craft or calling. I was a strong 
Protectionist. I held as my fiscal belief that if some 
foreign country wanted to sell you some article for 
sixpence which your own country could not produce 
for less than half-a-crown it was your bounden duty to 
insist upon paying half-a-crown so that your native in- 
dustries might not be crippled. 

When I became a preacher of the Gospel I became 
more and more conscious of the difficulty of in- 
terpreting the faith as I had been brought up to under- 
stand it, in terms that other people, particularly young 
people, could readily understand. I was feeling my 
way out through the long years to an interpretation of 
the faith which would not deny the experience that lay 
behind me and yet would be appropriate and applicable 
to the conditions I found around me. 

Then came the war. I know I speak often about 
the war; it seems to me I can scarcely get through a 
sermon without some allusion to it either directly or 
indirectly. I do not want to speak about it, but the 
war transformed life for me. It was the greatest thing 
that ever happened. It got to my soul as even the teach- 
ing of the faith had not reached it in previous years. 



GOD IS LIGHT 119 

I came away to live amongst the men. It was my great 
privilege to be neither a combatant nor an official, just 
a nondescript man, clad in khaki, responsible to no- 
body in particular, living amongst the men in a close 
informal way. I talked to them in their thousands, 
I talked to thousands of them as units. I slept where 
they slept, I went where they went. I wore no dis- 
tinguishing badge of any kind, no cross-belt, no stars, 
but just lived amongst the men without name, without 
title, without fame. It was often my place to speak 
to men as they were going into battle. I looked into a 
great sea of faces knowing very well that some of them 
I should not see again. It was often my place to count 
up those who were missing and to send home, on their 
behalf, messages to their friends. 

I came out of that thing as we all came out at last, 
a changed man. Life had taken on a new aspect, 
values had been altered. The truth that had come 
home to me with pungent power as truth often does 
in the most unlikely places and in the most unlikely 
way was this : — "God is light. This darkness, this 
turmoil, this hate and wretchedness is not God. God 
is light. If we walk in the light as He is in the light 
we shall have fellowship one with another. These 
hates and superstitions and prejudices and competi- 
tions are the negations of His light. If we walk in the 
light we have fellowship one with the other"; and 
there came to me a sense of a great consecration. It 
seemed as if blood had cleansed me from sin, from 
some kinds of sin at any rate. The blood of Tommy 
Atkins, the blood of the "unknown warriors" had 
cleansed me from some kinds of sin. I could no longer 



120 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

surrender myself to narrow nationalism, I had passed 
out of the ranks of the merely British folk, I had 
mingled in the multitude of humanity. It was not that 
I had lost (for nobody ever loses) the sense of the 
great association with the land that gave one birth 
whose history and traditions have touched you at every 
point. Nobody ever loses that, but I had passed out 
somehow into a wider association of men and I knew 
as I had never known before that men are fundamen- 
tally alike, modified by history, modified by climate, 
modified by traditions, modified by religion, but man 
is man wherever you find him, whether he be Briton 
or Frank or German, white or black, brown or yel- 
low, man is man and every one of us in our greatest 
human associations are just fellow-men. 

I learned that amidst the darkness. I learned it 
because I felt and knew that God was light. I learned 
it because blood touched me and cleansed away my 
prejudices. 

I learned also to look at fiscal things in a new way. 
I learned to see as I had never seen before that the 
object of all the great intricate tangle of commerce and 
industry is the well-being of mankind, that if we walk 
in the light those interests will draw us closer together, 
will not divide us into hostile camps and make ene- 
mies of us. I could not help seeing as you could not 
help seeing that down at the base of the great war were 
economic questions, questions that touched us all, that 
helped to precipitate the great catastrophe at last. The 
blood that touched me cleansed my mind, clarified my 
outlook, gave me a new attitude to all those ramify- 



GOD IS LIGHT 121 

ing conditions that make up our complex commercial 
and industrial life. 

I learned too, touched by blood, to see a new sacred- 
ness in the home and the cradle and the love that ex- 
ists between man and man, man and woman, man and 
child. I do not know why I learned it there as I had 
never learned it before, for the war was the direct 
negation of all these things, but it was blood that 
touched me and cleansed me from sin, from that kind 
of sin at any rate. 

Now I have ventured to say these personal things 
only because I know very well that there is nothing 
peculiarly personal in the story. It has been your ex- 
perience also, if not in every detail at least in its broad 
outlines and its deep underlying feeling. It seems to 
me that in the light of that experience through which 
we have all passed more or less, we may well come 
back to this ancient Book and see it anew. 

You know this Epistle was written by John. 
There is no need to argue that. If you are a student 
of the book you will most likely admit it, if you are 
not a student you will accept the statement. This was 
the man who in the days of our Lord's life leaned his 
head on Jesus' s breast. When Jesus went anywhere 
very particularly He always took John with Him. 
When He climbed the slopes of Olivet or was glorified 
upon the Mount of Transfiguration, or prayed in the 
Garden of Gethsemane He liked to have John near 
Him. In the anguish of the Cross His great eyes 
roamed over the faces of the people until they rested 
upon the face of John, and next to John, not con- 
sciously I suppose, but inevitably, there was standing 



122 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

His Mother. Jesus said to John: "Behold thy 
Mother.'' It was that kind of fellowship which John 
had with Jesus. 

When he tried to explain Jesus to the people he 
necessarily took the thought-forms of his time and 
cast his teaching into them. The thought-forms with 
which he was most familiar were those that centred 
in the Temple and the ritual of the Jews. Naturally, 
as all the apostles did in the beginning, John poured 
the new truth into the old conduits. 

But John lived a long while. He outlived the rest 
of the Twelve. He lived right on into the second 
century and then he found new movements afoot. 
When the Gospel had gone outside the Jewish circle 
and had come in contact with the great throbbing world 
there were new interpretations of things which began 
to be expressed and particularly as every student of 
history knows there was that which we have learnt to 
call Gnosticism. It was an attempt to amalgamate the 
emotionalism of the East with the culture of Greece 
and Rome. In John's time there was a special form of 
it which we call Docetism. Men thought that the in- 
finite God would never touch matter which was neces- 
sarily impure. The flesh was an unworthy thing to 
them. Spirit and flesh were widely separated. They 
thought that a man might live in the spirit and it mat- 
tered little what he did in the flesh. Some of them 
taught that a man might sin as much as he liked in the 
flesh so long as his spirit was pure. They taught that 
the Father God had never been identified with Jesus; 
there might have been an appearance of His dwelling 
with him but it was not real. Some of them taught 



GOD IS LIGHT 123 

that the Spirit of God rested upon Jesus at the time of 
His baptism but left Him again before the agony of 
His Cross. These were men who taught that the only 
thing that was necessary was to know, it was by no 
means so necessary to do. 

John wrote this Epistle as a protest against that kind 
of teaching and the first thing he laid emphasis upon 
was that Jesus was real. Who should know that if 
not John? . . . 

"That which we have heard, which we have seen 
with our eyes, which we have looked upon and our 
hands have handled, of the Word of Life; for the 
life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear 
witness, and shew unto you that eternal life, which was 
with the Father." 

John had the instinct for the 'historical. He knew 
that without a historical foundation nothing ever 
really becomes powerful in this world. Truth never 
becomes real until it touches the earth, truth never 
becomes dynamic until it is embodied. That is always 
so. Study philosophy and see how it always marches 
with history. There is little philosophy except where 
it touches history and roots itself in a fact. Columbus 
was not the first man who believed the world was 
round, and even when Columbus had been half way 
round it people were not convinced. It was only when 
Magellan had sailed right round the world that the 
truth that the earth was globular rather than flat took 
hold of men and moved them. 

Christianity would never have got a start if it had 
not rooted itself in a historical personality. My pres- 



124 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

ent day Gnostics, many of those speculations and as- 
pirations to which you give expression, would never 
have assumed reality had it not been for the historical 
life of Jesus. 

John was instinctively right and the Church has felt 
all down the centuries, that the historical Jesus is the 
basis of faith. John called Jesus God's Son. Why 
not? Will you tell me? I told that every man is 
God's son; the poor drunkard reeling down the street 
and the harlot in the gutter, they are God's sons, God's 
daughters. Sometimes at least you have seen the divine 
likeness flame out and become manifest. It is im- 
portant for you to believe that your fellow-men and 
women are God's sons and God's daughters — it is be- 
cause we forget that that so many horrible things take 
place in this old world. And, if they are God's sons, 
why not Jesus of Nazareth? Why the centuries bear 
witness that in His face and in His life God Himself 
flames out as in no other face and in no other life. 
If any man was God's Son, John was absolutely right 
when he said that Christ was God's Son. For me, I 
have reached the stage when I do not care to put any 
boundaries to the person of Jesus. I can't take the 
Pauline Epistles with their great and wonderful 
Christology — I can take them for myself, but if you 
cannot go so far, at least you may use the words that 
John used and speak of Jesus of Nazareth as God's 
Son. John held fast by the Crucifixion because it 
was the touch of reality, it demonstrated the reality 
of the love of God to Him, it lit it up with flame, it 
took it out of the realm of mere theory and speculation 
and rooted it in reality. He had seen it and touched 



GOD IS LIGHT 125 

it. He had seen the blood shed that cleansed from 
sin. If for me and for you the blood of the brave, 
those who died in the great war, has transformed our 
sense of moral values and has altered our outlook on 
life, you can readily understand surely, how such a 
life as that of Jesus of Nazareth touched men as noth- 
ing else had touched them, transformed their thinking, 
caused them to re-value their values, made the old 
world pass away, made a new world loom into view. 

I do not think this generation ought to be far away 
from the Cross of Calvary. A generation that has 
a cross in its heart should surely be near The Cross. 
The generation which carries in the secret chambers 
of its being the vision of a little wooden cross, a gen- 
eration which is all palpitating with fathers who have 
given their only begotten sons for the saving of the 
world should surely not be far away from the central 
mystery of the Christian faith which teaches that even 
as you were capable of great sacrificial giving for 
the saving of civilisation from destruction, so the 
Great Father Himself has given of Himself for the 
winning of the world. Was not the Incarnation a 
great act of splendid heroism on the part of God Him- 
self? 

That giving of the Christ is the world's supreme 
challenge, its dynamic centre, its symbol of sacrifice, 
of hope and of final victory. If He has not come 
into His Kingdom yet I will tell you why, for the 
same reason that we have not come into ours, because 
men do not walk in the light. There are men who in 
spite of the awful sacrifice of these last years are still 
in darkness, still cherishing the old hates, suspicions, 



126 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

bigotries and fears which caused that Golgotha. They 
a r e still doing their business in the same old arbitrary 
inhuman way, they have not seen the light, they are 
not walking in it. If you have had a feeling some- 
times as though you doubted whether the sacrifice 
had not been in vain, you have only the feeling that 
lies at the heart of the Christian faith. God Himself 
has suffered like you ; God Himself is seeing His new 
order checked and hindered by the selfishness of men; 
God Himself has to wait through the centuries, God 
Himself has to toil on and believe on for the final 
victory of love over hate and of light over darkness. 
This Christian faith of ours was never nearer to the 
hearts of men than it is to-day. We interpret its 
great doctrines in differing ways according to our 
time and the thought-forms of our time, but surely we 
are beginning to see that the ultimate truth is in psy- 
chological terms rather than in logical terms. When 
I look back over the past, and study the writings of the 
great souls of bygone days, I may not be able to ac- 
cept the formal statements of some of their dogmas, 
but my heart beats with theirs when I discover that 
psychologically our experience is identical. If one gen- 
eration with little power of critical analysis accepted 
the idea of a world that was sold into the power of 
Satan and had to be redeemed at the cost of Christ's 
blood, I recognise that they formed an explanation 
which really did explain the Cross to them. If it were 
the only explanation which I could get I should have 
to reject it. But the central Fact itself is distinct from 
these and other partial explanations. 

When all the apologetics of the Christian Faith 



GOD IS LIGHT 127 

have been done with, I think the last bit of common 
ground may well be found in the hymns of the Church. 
Aristotle said long ago that poetry was more philo- 
sophical than history, and had a higher intensity. 
There are those great hymns of the Church, some of 
them ages old, written by men of differing commun- 
ions, differing interpretations of identical experiences. 
You and I may differ in our interpretations very con- 
siderably but perhaps we may meet on the ground of 
inspired song. Listen to this :— 

'When I survey the wondrous Cross 
On which the Prince of glory died 
My richest gain I count but loss 
And pour contempt on all my pride. 

"Forbid it Lord that I should boast 
Save in the Death of Christ my Lord; 
All the vain things which charm me most 
I sacrifice them to His Blood. 

"See, from His head, His hands, His feet 
Sorrow and Love flow mingled down ; 
Did e'er such love and sorrow meet 
Or thorns compose so rich a crown ? 

"Were the whole realm of nature mine 

That were an offering far too small ; 
Love so amazing, so divine 

Demands my soul, my life, my all !" 

Oh, the words are too great to use, and the conscience 
retreats into the dark before the splendour of them, 
but the lives that have been most dynamic and the 
Christians who have been most triumphant have al- 



128 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

ways been those in whose hearts the Cross of Christ 
has cut the deepest lines. The most dynamic thing, 
the most uplifting thing, the most glorious thing in 
the world is that infinite sacrifice which we celebrate 
in our hearts this holy season. 



XII 

THINGS THAT WORK TOGETHER 

TEXT: Romans 8:28. We know that all things work to- 
gether for good to them that love God. 

1LOVE these sunlit mountain-peaks of the Bible. 
There are some passages of Scripture which almost 
everybody knows even in these days, when perhaps 
the habit of Bible study is not so prevalent as it used 
to be, and this is one of them. No one with discern- 
ing mind can help feeling, as we contemplate it, that 
millions of other souls beside ourselves have dwelt 
upon its message. Here is a passage that has been 
of unspeakable comfort to innumerable people in their 
hours of temptation and of difficulty, but it is only fair 
to say that it has been of unutterable difficulty to 
many other souls in their time of crisis. It is a pas- 
sage that has stimulated the greatest faith; it is a 
passage that has suggested the most cutting doubt. 
No one can understand a saying like this by mere 
logical processes. If ever a soul is able to rise to 
the height of its faith, it is doubtless in rare moments, 
and two things are always necessary — the one is ex- 
perience and the other is insight. 

Observation seems to contradict it. No one dare 
say that there is a specially smooth path prepared for 
the feet of those who love God. No one dare say that 
the pitiless blast is mitigated or that the fierce heat of 

1*0 



130 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

life's fire is tempered because the soul loves God. In- 
deed the test of a true heart is not found in its pros- 
perity, it is rather to the contrary. The truest heart, 
the heart that most loves God, is likely to enter the 
fiercest of the flame and endure the most pitiless blast 
of the tempest. Observation does seem to contradict 
the truth of this statement, and it is almost useless 
for the mind to seek to grasp a sure confidence con- 
cerning it by mere logical processes. 

There is no greater mystery known amongst men 
than that of the relation between the human and the 
Divine will. All down the ages, in every creed under 
the sun, this has been the perpetual problem, the per- 
petual question. Everybody who knows the history of 
our Christian faith knows that this has been its cen- 
tral problem. There have been some minds which 
have found refuge in the thought of a great will 
of God which so completely comprehended all things 
that nothing could depart from it; a purpose of God 
which saw the end from the "beginning, and was not 
only fixed as to its method, but fixed so completely 
that there could be no departure from it. There have 
been minds which have sought comfort in some such 
thought of God as that. I wonder that, amidst all 
their discussions, they have not more often dwelt upon 
the awful monotony of such a plan to God Himself. 
Who would not pity a God whose purposes were so 
arbitrarily fixed that there could be no departure from 
them? Whose ends were so clearly seen that there 
could never be one moment of hesitation in the Divine 
mind concerning the working out of those processes? 
— I say, who would not pity such a God as that? 



THINGS THAT WORK TOGETHER 131 

One cannot feel, as one reads this great classic pas- 
sage, the 8th of Romans, that Paul himself thought 
of God in that way. He thought of a God who had 
a purpose which even He could not arbitrarily fulfil. 
He spoke of a Spirit yearning for the accomplishment 
of His ends and apparently checked in His efforts. 
He says : — 

"The Spirit helpeth our infirmities: for we know 
not what we should pray for as we ought: but the 
Spirit Himself maketh intercession for us with groan- 
ings which cannot be uttered." 

It would seem that the Divine Being Himself had 
taken a step which was essentially a step of faith. It 
would seem that God Himself is justified by His 
faith even as we mortals are, that He would not 
be content so to exercise His will as to fix arbitrarily 
and without possible variation the purposes which 
He had laid down. It would seem that He brought 
into existence a creature called man who could not 
only love Him but could hate .Him; who could not only 
do His will but could thwart His will; who could not 
only yield to His love but could despise His love. 
It would seem that God brought such a creature into 
existence, that far away in the past, as far as our 
eyes can penetrate the mist, He made it possible for 
such a creature to exist, slowly to develop, slowly to 
work out his own destiny, able to thwart Him at times. 
He saw the end from the beginning, He fixed limita- 
tions for man's own security, but he did not fix 
man's every thought and his every deed, for, so at 
least we may dare to speculate, He wanted a creature 



132 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

who could come into free fellowship with Himself, 
who, amidst many mistakes and many lapses, could yet 
persist in his upward climb and could at last enter 
into a fellowship that was noble because it was free, 
and was individual because it had been wrought out 
amidst the fires of experience. 

It is a great God whom we have to think of, a 
God of at least thirty millions of suns as even our poor 
eyes can see, and we know well that our eyes have 
not reached the uttermost borders of vision. He is 
a God whose purposes are not completed in this little 
planet or in this little sweep of man's mortal life. Ours 
is a great faith ; a faith the implications of which grow 
upon men as the centuries past; a faith which may 
become more perplexing to the mind at times, but 
which in our moments of intuition and inspired in- 
sight we see to be grander and nobler than our fathers 
dreamed. We are even yet like little children, wander- 
ing upon the edge of a great sea, seeking ever to 
penetrate the purposes of God. We may give the 
rein to our speculation at times, and we are foolish 
if we limit God by our own narrow thought. We are 
somewhat timid if we dare not believe, even amidst the 
perplexities of life, its apparent injustices, its awful 
cruelties, there may yet be a Divine purpose which 
maketh for good. 

But I am not here just to speculate ; I should have 
no right to be here unless, in some valid way, I might 
dare to say I know that all things work together for 
good to them that love God. Paul said that, but I ask 
you to notice that he said it in a moment when he 
was not calm, when he was in the midst of a great 



THINGS THAT WORK TOGETHER 133 

spiritual afflatus, when his vision was keen, when his 
feeling was intense. It is just that makes this great 
chapter in Romans classic. It is an old, old chapter, 
but you cannot read it after all these hundreds of 
years without feeling the throb of a brave man's heart, 
the thrill of a dauntless spirit. Not even Paul could 
always write as he wrote in this 8th chapter. It was 
one of his great moments, when he saw into the 
heart of things. His exclamation of confidence is not 
mere dogmatism, it is the outcome of great insight, 
it is the outcome of a deep experience. We always 
feel, when we are reading what St. Paul wrote, that 
he was a man who had drunk very deeply of life's 
experience. Few men had so many vicissitudes of 
fortune as had Paul the Apostle. The doctrines which 
he enunciates are not the speculations of a quiet mind 
working as it were in the seclusion of some sheltered 
place. They are beliefs that have been wrought out 
in the furnace of life, that have been learned amidst 
experience. 

There are few great writers in the world who are 
so self-revealing as St. Paul, and yet he never seems 
to want to talk about himself. You remember that 
great passage in the 2nd Corinthians, when he tells us, 
in a moment when he was stung by the false accusa- 
tions of others, something of the story of his past : — 

"Of the Jews five times received I forty stripes save 
one. Thrice was I beaten with rods, once was I 
stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day 
I have been in the deep ; in journeyings often, in perils 
of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils by mine own 
countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in 



134 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, 
in perils among false brethren ; in weariness and pain- 
fulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in 
fastings often, in cold and nakedness. Beside those 
things that are without, that which cometh upon me 
daily, the care of all the Churches.' , 

The man who has passed through that is worthy to 
be listened to, and the truths that he had laid hold of 
are valid truths, wrought out amidst the fires of ex- 
perience. Hear him again in his letter to the Philip- 
pians : — 

"I have learned in whatsoever state I am therein 
to be content. I know both how to be abased, and 
I know how to abound: everywhere and in all things 
I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, 
both to abound and to suffer need. I can do all things 
through Christ which strengthened me." 

This is a man then who had learned the truth 
through experience, experience aided by insight — in- 
sight that came to him in moments of inspiration, 
when he saw into the hidden meaning of things, and 
got his hill-top vision. Not always was it so with 
him. Sometimes the clouds must have come and 
blotted it out. But so deep was his impression that 
he held to it as the great central belief of his life, 
and his voice rings with confidence as he says : — "We 
know that all things work together for good to them 
that love God." 

Now it seems to me that the heart of that saying 
lies in those two words, "work together." The most 
apparently contradictory things in life are not con- 






THINGS THAT WORK TOGETHER 135 

trary so much as complementary. Light is not con- 
trary to darkness, it is complementary; joy is not the 
contrary of sorrow, it is its complement; right is not 
only the contrary of wrong, it is its complement; you 
cannot have the one without the other. 

I believe that Jesus Christ was the happiest Man who 
ever lived. Perhaps some heart says, "But was He 
not the Man of Sorrows?" Yes, because He was 
happy. No man knows what sorrow is who does not 
know what happiness is. No man is capable of sorrow 
who is not capable of happiness. Laughter and tears lie 
close together, you cannot separate them. That which 
makes a man without humour so dreadful a person is 
that he is a man without pity ; a man who cannot laugh 
can do the most cruel things. A man who can laugh 
truly cannot go clown into the depths of cruelty. 
Laughter and tears are compact of the same mystery, 
they work together. If it were possible, as we try in 
our futility to do, so to safeguard our lives that we 
should never know what sorrow is, we should wake up 
wondering what had happened to our joys. These 
things "work together." I had not known right unless 
I had known wrong; I had not loved the truth unless 
I had heard a lie — not only the blatant lie, but the half 
lie, the treacherous, subtle, plausible lie that sounds so 
like the truth, but is so much more destructive than the 
most blatant lie. I had never learned to love the truth 
unless I had heard that thing and felt something of 
its wrong. 

It is no use my desiring courage if I am not pre- 
pared for the battle. There is no courage without con- 
flict. I had not known love unless I had known hate. 



136 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

You cannot have the one without the other — they 
"work together." What Paul had discovered in his 
life was that all these contrary things that seem so 
baffling, so threatening, so thwarting, were the very- 
things out of which after all he wrung his triumph 
and his joy. That "thorn in the flesh' ' of his was not 
a blessing taken by itself ; how could it be? It checked 
him, spoiled his usefulness, shook his confidence, al- 
most broke his heart; how could it be a blessing, only 
that he discovered that it "worked together" with 
the grace of God. Out of his own unutterable weak- 
ness came the discovery of the wonderful strength of 
God. 

It is the human soul that decides values after all. 
I used to think in the war time (one does not like to 
refer to the war time nowadays, but life changed then 
for many of us — human nature was revealed stripped 
of all its adventitious values; you got down to realities 
at last). I used to notice that when the men waxed 
confidential, they always undid the flap of their tunic 
pocket, and presently produced their most precious 
things. Often a man would take out of his pocket 
some scrap of literature which he read in his spare 
moments. There were two things in this connection 
that the boys were exceedingly fond of, the one was 
the writings of Omar Khayaam, and the other was 
that little poem of Kipling's called "If." Scores of 
times in my experience, when men talked quietly and 
confidentially, they fell back upon either one of those 
two things. Those were the days when material 
forces were let loose which seemed to take no account 



THINGS THAT WORK TOGETHER 137 

of the human soul, but came shattering down upon 
men and reduced them to a mere nothing. Some men 
there were who succumbed to it and seemed almost 
to exult in the sayings of that brilliant Persian mathe- 
matician, astronomer, free-thinker, Omar Khayaam, 
accepting withia savage kind of comfort the belief that 
a pitiless fate conquered what was great and beautiful 
and noble, and it was all one, whether you were good 
or bad, this same pitiless fate swept you away. 

But there were other men who had got their feet 
upon a rock, and somehow, amidst the tempest, learned 
the value of the human soul. Many and many a time 
I heard them recite those lines of Kipling's; I know 
they are very hackneyed, but perhaps you will listen 
to them in this connection to-night : — 

"If you can keep your head, when all about you 
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, 
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, 
But make allowance for their doubting too ; 
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, 
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies, 
Or being hated, don't give way to hating. 
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise; 

"If you can dream — and not make dreams your 
master ; 
If you can think — and not make thoughts your aim, 
If you can meet with triumph and disaster 
And beat those two imposters just the same; 
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken 
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, 
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken, 
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools; 



138 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

"If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, 
Or walk with Kings — nor lose the common touch, 
If neither foe nor loving friend can hurt you, 
If all men count with you, but none too much. 
If you can fill the unforgiving minute 
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run, 
Yours is the earth, and everything that's in it, 
And — which is more — you'll be a man, my son!" 

It is just the discovery that the soul is the great 
thing after all which transforms men. And if the soul 
be the great thing, how can you have its virtue with- 
out its vice, how can you have its victory without its 
battle? What merit is there when all other people 
are thinking as you are, and you are acclaimed as 
being wise because your voice accords with the voice 
of the multitude? That is not keeping your head, 
maybe that is losing it. You only know you have kept 
your head when, amidst the clamour of discordant 
voices, you hold fast by the truth as you know it. 

This is the truth, — all things work together for good 
if you have a co-ordinating principle like the love of 
God. It is that co-ordinating principle which makes 
the unity of life. It is not the segregation of good and 
evil, not the division of experience, it is the complex 
experience reconciled by a great co-ordinating prin- 
ciple. 

I love biography, but I cannot find great and good 
men except among those who were tested in the flame, 
except among those against whom the forces of life 
seemed to beat more and more as though they were 
determined to thwart and destroy and spoil. But the 
soul of a man, inspired by a great principle like the 



THINGS THAT WORK TOGETHER 139 

love of God, discovers the mystery of how these ap- 
parently contrary things work together. 

Ship-wreck: what good was ship-wreck to Paul? 
Beaten with scourges until his back bled: what good 
was that to Paul? But his soul took out of those ex- 
periences a more resolute courage, a truer compassion, 
a truer insight into the souls of men, a great dis- 
covery of the unutterable power of the Divine, and 
he says, in his moment of inspired insight, though 
the past looms behind him with all its checkered story, 
"We know that all things work together for good to 
them that love God." 

What is it to love God ? You say you cannot climb 
to that dizzy height, you have not faith, you have not 
knowledge; but there is another way in which you 
can love God — you can love your neighbour. It is of 
His mercy that He does not always expect us to scale 
the heights and solve those problems which at once 
baffle and yet allure men, which are at once the greatest 
difficulty and yet the greatest inspiration of religion. 
He does not expect us to solve all these, but points out 
an easier and a more accessible way. You would love 
God ? There is your neighbour, what about him ? Will 
you exploit him, will you jostle him out of the way, will 
you treat him roughly, will you neglect him, as though 
he had no concern for you? That is the negation of 
the love of God. But whosoever will love his neigh- 
bour will find his way to God opening up before him, 
nay, at long last it may be there is little or no dis- 
tinction between love of God and love to man, and 
whosoever has that most wonderful, beautiful and 
co-ordinating thing in life, Love, will yet find light 



140 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

and dark, sorrow and joy, right and wrong, life and 
death, heaven and hell, all things working together 
for good, while the soul will find its own way to tri- 
umph and to God. 






XIII 

THE PLACE OF VISION 

TEXT: Psalm 27:13. I had fainted, unless I had believed 
to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the 
living. 

IF you will glance at your Bible, you will notice 
that the words, "I had fainted/' are printed in 
italics, which, as you know, indicates that the trans- 
lators, not finding a word in the original Hebrew 
which seemed to them to complete the sense, have 
added these words, "I had fainted." 

And yet the sense is complete without them, the 
more especially if one were reciting this passage rather 
than reading it. Many commentators think that this 
Psalm we call the 27th is in reality two separate 
Psalms which have somehow become incorporated. 
Certainly from verses one to six it is an expression 
of sublime and happy confidence in God; while from 
the seventh verse onward it is in a minor key; the 
Psalmist is here revealed as in the midst of difficulties, 
eagerly supplicating the help of God. It may be that 
his mood has changed dramatically, or it may be that 
there are two separate Psalms bound together here, 
but from the seventh verse onward this man is in 
the midst of difficulties ; he is even somewhat doubtful 
of the presence of God. Thus he says : — 

141 



142 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

"Hide not Thy face far from me; put not Thy 
servant away in anger : Thou hast been my help ; cast 
me not off, neither forsake me, O God of my salva- 
tion. 

"For my father and my mother have forsaken me," 

(It is not the way a full-grown man usually speaks, 
but this is probably a proverbial expression which sug- 
gests that even those upon whom one might have 
counted with absolute confidence had forsaken him in 
his moment of peril.) 

"Deliver me not over unto the will of mine ad- 
versaries: for false witnesses are risen up against 
me, and such as breathe out cruelty. " 

To be forsaken is bad enough, but to be hemmed 
around with people so closely that you seem to be 
stifled, and to know all the while that they are twist- 
ing the "truth you speak to make a trap for fools/' 
are witnessing falsely against you; surely this was 
enough to make a man faint! Then he cries, "Unless 
I had believed to see the goodness of the Lord in the 
land of the living!" It is an exclamation, as though 
the Psalmist reels back from the contemplation of 
the terrible alternative. 

Our translators have simplified the reading, but 
they have taken away something of the dramatic force 
in supplying the words which seem to them to be 
missing ("I had fainted"). Their instinct has been 
right I fancy, since they were contemplating a man 
of God. When life becomes too much for such a 
man, the tendency is to throw up the struggle, to 
sheath the sword, to faint. 



THE PLACE OF VISION 143 

But there are other men who might have required 
other words to describe their mood. In such a 
time the Epicurean might have said, "Let us eat, 
drink and be merry, for to-morrow we die." The 
sensualist might have said, "I fling the reins on the 
neck of my passions; who cares?" But the man of 
God would more likely say, "I had fainted, unless I 
had believed to see the goodness of the Lord in the 
land of the living." 

It is that word, "unless" that is the dramatic word 
— a word that is full of mercy and the suggestion 
of Providence. It is the thought of that strange, 
unexpected counter-check and counter-balance which 
comes to one's help just in the hour of need, "Unless." 

When we contemplate Nature, the thing that im- 
presses us and helps us to believe that it is the ex- 
pression of an All-creative Will is just the discovery 
of that Something in the heart of things which arrests 
decay or averts catastrophe. This planet on which we 
live, for instance, is as we know whirling around the 
sun in a great orbit comprising many millions of miles, 
as if it had been flung out from a central fire and 
went reeling on its way, so that there could be no 
end but catastrophe "unless" it were held up by that 
strange mystic power we only call (we do not ex- 
plain) the Law of Gravitation. 

We have come to Church to-day through the 
Autumn-tide, and some of you may have come, as I 
did, through the woods. You have seen the trees, 
which only the other day were rounded and soft in 
their leafy beauty, stripped of all their loveliness, so 
that now they rise up against the wintry sky witH 



144 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

stark and gaunt stems and branches. Were it not 
for experience you might say, "The beauty has gone, 
the earth is old and withered, the glory is departed !" 
But experience smiles into your face and says, "That 
would be so, unless there were a power which takes 
the green life out of the fragile leaves, that the wintry 
winds would blow away, and gathers it back into the 
stems and twigs, waiting for the renaissance of the 
Spring. It is the "unless" that makes you conscious 
of the mystery and power of Nature. 

"All the rivers run into the sea, and yet the sea is 
not full/' said the melancholy preacher hundreds of 
years ago, and that was to him a symbol of monotony. 
But sometimes, when we watch the rivers, how they 
gather the pollutions of the town, how sometimes 
they stagnate into pools, how when at last they roll 
into the sea they become impregnated with salt and 
never again could minister to our thirst nor fertilise 
the earth, unless there had been that wonderful mystic 
power by which, as in invisible chariots, the old soiled 
fallen waters go up again into the blue sky to come 
down once more to re-fertilise the world. It is that 
"unless" that speaks of divine wisdom and power. 

In our own lives, how weary we become ! How the 
days crowd in upon us, the pressure of business, the 
clamour of the market, the dull routine of the daily 
task. Oh, we had fainted, unless there had been that 
mystery we call sleep, by which a man dies as it 
were, shuts his eyes upon life with all its questionings 
and problems, takes his short cruise into the realm 
of death and comes out of it again with new light 
in his face and new strength in his body. It is that 



THE PLACE OF VISION 145 

"unless" of sleep that makes life, not only tolerable, 
but fills us with a sense of wonder concerning the 
goodness of God. 

When we look around Nature, there seems to be 
something automatic in this provision that has been 
made. 

"Change and decay in all around I see," we sing 
sometimes in one of our great hymns; the grass 
withereth, the flower fadeth, the face and the fashion 
of it faileth, life issues in death, and all seems to be 
changing and decaying, only that there seems to be 
something which works with a kind of mechanical 
precision, so that the decay is arrested and the catas- 
trophe is averted. 

When we look within at the mystery of our own 
lives, this counter-checking, counter-balancing thing is 
not automatic; it is personal; it is embedded in the 
depths of our personality. 

I had fainted, unless I had believed! There are 
two selves; there is the weak one and there is the 
strong one. There is the one that succumbs and there 
is the one that fights on; and we always find that our 
refreshment comes from an accession of personality. 

Last week many of you 'listened to a brilliant and 
thought-provoking address from an eminent biologist 
about our individuality, and from his point of view 
he impressed us with our limitations. He made us 
feel that there are encircling walls beyond which we 
cannot get. Yes, that is so, but there is another "I" 
within us that does go further. There is an "I" that 
rises up, saying "I believe," and breaks through the 
encircling wall. I suggest that that "I" is as much 



146 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

a part of our personality as the bones that make up 
our body or the skull that closes in our brain. It is 
not from the biologist's angle altogether that we un- 
derstand ourselves. There are realities within our 
being which cannot be expressed in physical terms. 
Faith is as much a part of man as muscle. It is the 
promise of a greater life beyond; it is the principle 
that constantly challenges the mood that would faint 
or give up the struggle. 

Fortunately for us, faith in some form or other is 
as truly a part of us as our physical organs. I like 
those anonymous words : — 

"There is no unbelief: 
Whoever plants a seed beneath the sod, 
And waits to see it push away the clod, 
He trusts in God. 

"There is no unbelief : 
Whoever sees, 'neath fields of winter snow, 
The silent harvest of the future grow, 
God's power must know. 

"There is no unbelief: 
Whoever says, when clouds are in the sky, 
Be patient, heart, light breaketh by and by, 
Trusts the Most High. 

"There is no unbelief : 
Whoever lies down on his couch to sleep, 
Content to lock each sense in slumber deep, 
Knows God will keep. 

"There is no unbelief: 
Whoever looks on when the eyelids close, 



THE PLACE OF VISION 147 

And dares to live when life has only woes, 
God's comfort knows. 

"There is no unbelief: 
Whoever says, 'To-morrow, The Unknown, 
The Future,' trusts that Power alone 
He dares disown. 

"There is no unbelief: 
For thus, by day and night continually, 
The heart lives by the faith the lips deny — > 
God knoweth why." 

How often we had fainted, except we had believed. 
When you pray to God for some help in your time 
of crisis, do not be dismayed because there happens 
no miracle. God does not obtrude Himself upon 
us that way. God never draws attention to Himself; 
He is not self-centred; He is self-obliterating. He, 
the soul of our soul, the life of our life, the upholder 
of the universe, is the only Being who is not clamor- 
ous and self-centred, desiring the applause or gratitude 
of men. He is the Father of Jesus Christ, and the 
secret of His Divine Love is self-forgetfulness. He 
carries within the innermost recesses of His Being 
a Cross. The Cross was in the heart of God, and that 
is why it came to be on the hill called Calvary. When 
you supplicate the Great Eternal for help, in your 
hour of crisis, do not expect a miracle, do not expect 
to see Him or hear Him; but if there comes to you 
an accession of individuality, if that other "I" rises 
up within you and says to the weak complaining "I" 
that laments "I am fainting," "Nay, but I believe," 
be sure that God has answered your prayer. 



148 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

All deliverance for us comes through an accession 
of individuality. God helps us to win out by making 
us strong. 

And now, just for a moment, think of this last 
phrase : "I had fainted, unless I had believed to see 
the goodness of the Lord" — Where? "In the land of 
the living." 

It may be that is a characteristic Hebrew note, for 
the Hebrews, as you know, like most ancient people, 
had but a vague and fleeting vision of a life beyond 
the grave. They did believe — all men seem to be- 
lieve, but to them the life beyond the grave was a 
pale shadow of the life that now is. Their views 
of God's Providence were short in their range. They 
wanted to see His goodness here and now in the land 
of the living. 

Christianity, as you know, shifted the central point 
of existence to a realm out beyond the grave. We 
say it "brought life and immortality to light." It 
made men to think of themselves as not conditioned 
by the body, to think of life as not bounded by the 
grave. Maybe that Christian people have erred on 
their side. The ancient Hebrews thought of this life 
as red-blooded and that life as pale and shadowy, 
and it may be that Christians have sometimes spoken 
of that life as the full life and this life as but a pale 
shadow. 

Is not the truth that all life is one? It is as per- 
fectly conditioned for its tasks here in the body as 
it can ever be yonder when the body has ceased to 
be. It is the one life, just as the life of a child is 
a perfect life for a child. You would not wish to 



THE PLACE OF VISION 149 

give him the experience and thoughts of a man. He 
is full of life, but full of that kind of life which is 
native and natural to a child. 

I hold that the life is one, and that here and now, 
as I have it, it belongs to the body, and I want to see 
the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. 

There are some kinds of goodness that one feels 
daring enough to say we shall never know if we do 
not know them here in the land of the living. Our 
fathers have been accustomed to speak of the life 
beyond as if it were a life in which there would be 
no temptation. Well, maybe. But is there no good 
in temptation? Is it not worth while? Are there 
no lessons to be learned in it, no victories to be 
achieved? Temptation is part of this life, and we 
should want to see the goodness of the Lord in the 
midst of it 

Our fathers have spoken of the life beyond as 
if the wicked would not be there. They have described 
variously where the wicked would be, but they have 
always described the life over the border as a life 
of uninterrupted and flawless fellowship with the 
saints. Well, maybe. But is there no good in con- 
tact with men who are not saints ? Is it not good for 
us to be surrounded with all manner of men and 
women? Are there not some things to learn from the 
ill-mannered or the black-hearted? Are there not 
some tasks to be done under these conditions which 
must be done here and now in the land of the living? 

Our fathers have spoken of the life beyond as if 
all our familiar fellowships would have undergone a 
great change. They have left us doubtful whether our 



150 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

highest human relationships, those of husband and 
wife, father and child, would remain the same, and 
men have wistfully wondered whether these relation- 
ships even exist in the great life beyond. Well, who 
knows? But is there not something that makes them 
precious here; is it not worth while to have known 
true love between one heart and another? Is it not 
worth while to have looked into eyes that were almost 
on a level with your own and said, "My father," "My 
mother" ? 

It is not doing honour to God if we slur over the 
land of the living because we believe in a life that 
is greater still. While I am a child, let me think 
as a child, live as a child. While I am a son of man, 
buffeted, tempted, beaten back struggling in the con- 
test between the right and the wrong, labouring for 
ideals which never seem to materialise, winning my 
way through difficulties and threading my way 
through the mist and blackness, while I am so condi- 
tioned, let me be so conditioned. Let me believe to see 
the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. 

I like those words of Henley's : — 

"Thunder the brave irresistible message, 
Life is worth living 
Through every grain of it, 
From the foundation 
To the last edge 
Of the corner-stone death." 

"Through every grain of it," and some of the grains 
are hot and scorching. You would gladly slouch 
through them or sweep them aside. Does it not de- 



THE PLACE OF VISION 151 

pend upon which "I" is dominant, the lower or the 
higher one? The one which says "I am fainting" or 
the other one which answers "I believe!" "Life if 
worth living through every grain of it," but let your 
better self be revitalised, strengthened by prayer and 
communion with your God. Let it stand up and say 
within your soul, "I believe!" 

These are great days through which we are living" 
— the world has probably seen no greater. When you 
look abroad and think of that new impulse that came 
this very week, to cheer the lives of men, from the 
Washington Conference, did you think what that has 
meant to the psychology of the world? It is as if 
the sun broke through the clouds, as if a fresh sea 
breeze drove away the malaria, as if we began to feel 
there is a way of escape from that stifling suspicion 
and international rivalry which threatened the world 
with destruction. If that prove false, it will be be- 
cause men will not trust the future, but looking only 
on the past, shall say "It is impossible." It will suc- 
ceed (it will not bring the Millenium), but it will 
open the door to further advance if men put behind 
it their higher self and say, "I Believe." 

For what men believe, if they believe it numerously 
enough, intelligently enough, bravely enough, they can 
at last do. 

These words of the text, as you might guess, have 
some personal significance for me this morning. I had 
not intended to mention the fact, until it was men- 
tioned in the announcements, that I have just closed 
the second year of my ministry here at the City 
Temple. You will not be surprised to know that the 



152 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

text was suggested to my mind because of that fact. 
I remembered that there was an "I" that whispered, 
"I dare not; I faint." I remembered that there was 
another "I" that said, two years ago, in stronger 
tones, "I believe." I bear my glad witness this morn- 
ing that it was better to have yielded to the voice which 
said "I believe" than to the one which said "I dare 
not." 

I bear my grateful witness to you that you have 
fortified that belief with your constant sympathy and 
thought and prayer. 

I bear witness to my officers, who have been about 
me as a strong wall. I am sorry that one of them 
is not with us to-day because of illness ; I hope he will 
soon be back again in his accustomed place. 

I bear my grateful tribute to the sidesmen, who, 
week in, week out, by their unostentatious service, help 
on the work and make it move smoothly. 

I bear my witness to all those loyal and loving 
hearts who are working behind the scenes; and I 
bear my witness to this gifted and beautiful choir be- 
hind me, whose greatest glory seems to be the way 
they subordinate their talent to the effect of the preach- 
ing. 

And the preaching should be subordinate to the 
good of the people, while they who receive good should 
seek to translate its influence into the greater glory 
of God and the greater service of man. 

"I had fainted, unless I had believed to see the 
goodness of the Lord in the land of the living." Let 
the stronger "I," the more believing "I," rise up in 
your heart and life, and may each one of you go 



THE PLACE OF VISION 153 

forth to face your life afresh this morning, saying 
in your heart, ''Whatever be my difficulties, let me 
see the goodness of the Lord here in the land of the 
living, in that compensating, counter-checking, re- 
deeming, Divine 'Unless,' which arrests decay and 
averts catastrophe." 

Let the stronger believing self overcome the weaker 
doubting self, and go forth to believe and to conquer. 



XIV 
THE ONE THING 
TEXT: Luke 10:42. But one thing is needful. 

JESUS' explanation of life is not analytical — it is 
synthetical. He does not take it to pieces and ex- 
plain its parts ; He shows it to us whole — He makes us 
feel the wholeness of life as no one else does. 

Nature is one great unity — there is a direct rela- 
tionship between the farthest star and the smallest 
daisy. There is a direct connection between the bend- 
ing of the stalk of a flower and the swing of a planet. 

A friend of mine, who is both an artist and a nat- 
uralist, was explaining to me that every leaf upon a 
tree sends its tiny thread of woody matter down 
through the twig into the branches and the trunk itself, 
and even into the root. The growth of a tree is not 
upward only, the thickening comes down also from 
above; every leaf is not stuck on to the tree, but is 
part of the oneness of the tree, and the artist who 
would paint a tree truly must discern that. Many an 
artist has missed it ; the genius of Turner never missed 
it. 

For most people, life is a central stem of existence, 
with a heterogeneous mass of accidental things cling- 
ing to it. They would like to cut away a lot of things 
from their life, which seem to .have no relation to its 

154 



THE ONE THING 155 

real purpose, and are not organic parts of one great 
whole. 

For Jesus, life as a whole — it was "one thing." 
That is an expression we often hear upon His lips; 
it is a thought we often find in His parables. ' 'Mar- 
tha," He said, "but one thing is needful." These sis- 
ters had divided that one thing into two; the one 
showed the spirit of service, the other showed the 
spirit of worship, and these two were in conflict. To 
Him they were one — life is both service and worship. 

"One thing thou lackest," He said to the young 
man. It was not poverty He was recommending, but 
here was a man whose life was torn in two; his spir- 
itual desires and his material possessions were in con- 
flict; the man's life was not whole, and Jesus only put 
His finger upon the indicative thing to show where the 
divergence came in, and made an appeal for the unity 
of life. 

I read to you just two of His parables; there is a 
whole cluster in this 13th chapter of Matthew. 

"The Kingdom of Heaven is like unto treasure hid in 
a field; the which, when a man hath found, he hideth, 
and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, 
and buyeth that field." — That one thing. 

"Again, the Kingdom of Heaven is like unto a mer- 
chant man seeking goodly pearls : who, when he had 
found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that 
he had and bought it." — He bought the one thing. 

Life is never right for anybody until it becomes One 
Thing. What was the one thing in the mind of 
Jesus? I think we cannot pause for a moment in 



156 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

doubt. If you had never seen the Gospels, and I put 
them into your hand for the first time, especially the 
three Synoptic Gospels, and said to you, "Read that, 
and tell me what is characteristic of Jesus, what it was 
that dominated iHim," you would turn over the pages 
and say, "Why this man is always talking about the 
Kingdom of God; it seems to be the one thought that 
possesses His mind. 

Jesus spoke about the Kingdom of God partly be- 
cause everybody else was speaking about it ; it was the 
question of the day; all men were dreaming about it. 
It was a thought that had come a long way down 
through history ; it had been the theme of the prophets ; 
it had been the theme of those later writers, whose 
writings for us have dropped out between the end of 
the canon of the Old Testament and the beginning 
of the canon of the New. Most of the prophetic 
writings had their origin about the time of the great 
exile of the Jewish people. In those days of exile, 
the prophets dreamed of a great day that was coming, 
when the Kingdom of God would be set up on earth, 
and, as is natural in our wonderful human nature, when 
we are lowest down, hope shines brightest; when we 
are confronted with one trouble, we are always seeing 
through it and beholding the dawn of a new light. So 
the prophets spoke as if, when the exile should be over 
and the people should be restored again to the ancient 
land, the Kingdom of God would come ; the day would 
dawn at last when God would reign supreme, when 
Israel's ancient glory would come back to her, when 
there should be one faith throughout all the earth, 
when war should be no more, and swords and spears 



THE ONE THING 157 

should be beaten into implements of peace. It would 
be a time when even Nature herself would glow with 
additional beauty. The sun would be seven times 
brighter than before, the very wild beasts would 4ose 
their fierceness, and the lion would lie down with the 
lamb. 

All the idyllic pictures charmed the minds of the 
people in the days of their bondage and punishment, 
but when at last they came back to the promised land, 
they did not find it all they had hoped. This people, 
who for seventy years or more had not known what it 
was to be free or rule themselves, were now torn and 
rent with schisms, and it was not long before their 
weakness brought first the Greeks and then the Romans 
down upon them, and their Holy City itself at last was 
dominated with foreign troops. A mood of pessim- 
ism settled down upon the people; they did not lose 
their faith in that day of God, but it took upon itself 
more sombre colours, and the teachers who now arose 
spoke as if the world were utterly bad and could not 
be made right from within. God had forsaken them. 
But after a time, He would come again they said, He 
would break in from without, suddenly, with power, 
with flaming authority and rending cataclysm, and the 
Kingdom would come at last. 

When Jesus began His teaching, that is the way 
all men were talking, that was the way they were 
dreaming. They wanted to know more than any- 
thing else what He had to say about the Kingdom of 
God. What He said was, — "The Kingdom of God is 
here ; you have not to wait for it, it is here ; the King- 



158 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

dom of God is among you; the Kingdom of God is 
within you." 

The Kingdom is like, — what? Like everything. 
Whatever His eyes rested upon, He said "The King- 
dom is like that." If He saw a sower sowing in the 
fields, He said, — "The Kingdom of God is like that." 
If He saw men fishing in the lake, He said "The King- 
dom of God is like that." If He saw a woman at 
work in her kitchen, measuring her meal and mixing 
her leaven, He said, — "The Kingdom is like that." The 
Kingdom of God is like everything your eyes rest 
upon, if you -can see it. «It is there all the time; you 
have not to wait for something to break in from with- 
out. There is no cataclysm, no divine rushing inter- 
ference; the Kingdom is here. 

That was the message of Jesus, and when He talked 
like that, He was not blind to life's anomalies or to 
life's difficulties. He did not imagine that evil did not 
exist; He knew it was there; but He saw the oneness 
of the world beneath the diversities. He said,- — "The 
sower goes forth to sow; he sows one seed, but some 
of it falls on the wayside and is snatched away by the 
birds ; some falls on shallow ground ; some falls amidst 
thorns and is choked; some on good ground; but it is 
one Truth." 

The Kingdom of God is like a man who sowed good 
seed, but an enemy sowed tares, and presently they 
said to Him, — "Behold the tares amidst the wheat; 
shall we pluck away the tares?" and He said, — "Let 
both grow together till the harvest." 

You cannot get rid of evil like that ; it will be there 
until the end, let them grow together. The Kingdom 



THE ONE THING 159 

of God is not absent because the tares are growing 
with the wheat. The harvest is one complete thing. 

The Kingdom of God is like a fisherman, who cast 
out his net, and lo, it encompassed a great multitude of 
fishes — some of them good and some bad. You must 
wait until the end before you separate the good from 
the bad. But the net is one. 

The Kingdom of God to Him was not a thing that 
did not exist because evil remained; the Kingdom was 
there in the midst of evil, if you had eyes to see. 

"There is nothing new under the sun," said the pes- 
simist long, long ago. There is nothing that man has 
found out in all the long centuries of his life upon the 
planet that was not there potentially in the beginning. 
All man's great discoveries have been simply discov- 
eries of how to avail himself of things that were al- 
ready there. 

You remember the traditional tale of how Hans Lip- 
pershey, looking out through a shop window, acci- 
dentally placed in line two lenses, one convex and the 
other concave, in either hand so that his sight, passing 
through both made the steeple of a neighboring 
church seem strangely near. It was only the dis- 
covery of how to use old things that made new worlds 
swim into view. 

When Fulton learned how to make the first steam- 
ship, you remember how he used to watch the ferry- 
man, a returned soldier who had lost his arms but yet 
wanted to earn a living. He had devised two paddles 
which he could work with his feet so that they turned 
in the water and propelled his boat. And Fulton said, 
"I want something that will drive a propeller like that 



160 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

and I shall have a ship." Steam was a most familiar 
thing — he had but learned how to use it. 

Electricity is not a new thing; it was there in the 
days of Abraham; but at last men discovered how to 
avail themselves of it, and the world took on new char- 
acteristics. The Kingdom had been there all the time, 
but they had not known how to live as its citizens. 

When the minds of men opened to the wonders 
of wireless telegraphy, it was not because it was a 
new thing, it was only because they had found out the 
existence of an old thing. 

There are wonders yet coming upon us, which will 
make the triumphs of our day seem mere child's play. 
There are things men will do in the future, maybe in 
the near future, before which the imagination at this 
moment would reel in utter unbelief. But, whatever 
he does, he will never make a new thing — he will only 
discover and put himself into harmonious relationship 
with some old, old thing that the Creator placed, poten- 
tially at any rate, in the heart of His world when He 
launched it upon its course. 

Jesus would have us believe it is the same with moral 
dynamics, as it is with physical dynamics. You do 
not want God to break in with new and awful power, 
you only want to open your heart to Him and put your- 
self in harmonious relationship with powers that al- 
ready exist. The Kingdom of God is among you, the 
Kingdom of God is here ! 

Ah, but you say, — "How can you talk like that in a 
world as we see it to-day ? Are you blind ; are you not 
conscious of the utter wretchedness, the starvation, the 
hatred, the turmoil, the unrest, that makes the almost 



THE ONE THING 161 

monotonous configuration of the world as we look 
out upon it?" Yes, I am conscious of all that. No 
man has a right to forget the back-ground of the 
world's tragedy in these days, but still I repeat, the 
Kingdom of God is here, it is among you, within you. 
The reason of that chaos is that men have not lived 
in this world as if the Kingdom of God was really here. 
Some of them were teaching that the world was utterly 
bad, and as such was only doomed to judgment. Some 
were teaching that the economic laws were not conso- 
nant with religious faith. They have been dislocating 
the world; they have been treating it wrongfully, 
manipulating it, breaking its harmonies, destroying its 
music, and because it is the Kingdom of God, it is all 
a jangle with discords. We have been acting in it as 
if it were a jungle of wild beasts, and the great dis- 
covery we have got to make and re-make is how to live 
in it as citizens of God's Kingdom — that is the only 
way. I am not blind to evil; I know its presence, I 
know its power, but the test of life and the essence of 
life, the last great purpose surely of the Divine Being, 
is to bring into existence at last an ever-growing race 
of men and women who will live within the world that 
He has made like citizens of the Kingdom of God. 

We have to make a re-discovery of the power of 
moral forces; we have to learn that we must give 
ourselves to the discovery of moral dynamics with the 
same earnestness that we give ourselves to the mastery 
of physical power. We have to learn that God will 
flow in upon us in the realm of the soul as He flows 
in upon us when, with our lamps of knowledge, we 
enquire into the secret of the laws of nature. It is 



162 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

just the discovery that, in spite of all apparent contra- 
dictions, the Kingdom of God is with us that is the 
supreme discovery to which our Lord referred so often 
in His parables. 

I love this parable of the treasure hid in a field, but 
I love still more this parable of the pearl-seeker :— 

"The Kingdom of Heaven is like unto a merchant- 
man seeking goodly pearls, who, when he had found 
one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he 
had and bought it." 

No pearl-seeker goes out to seek one pearl of great 
price; he goes out to seek pearls — any pearls. He is 
a lover of pearls, he will be interested in a pearl 
wherever he finds it, whether small or great; he will 
pay its appropriate price and gather it into his stock. 
It is a systematic search; it is a love for little pearls, 
for all manner of pearls, until one day his unceasing 
search at last brings him face to face with one great 
pearl. It is a parable of dilligent search and of specu- 
lative faith, for it is one thing to buy a field and an- 
other thing to buy a pearl. You might not find a 
market for your great pearl; you must take the risk 
of that; but this man loves the beauty of pearls so 
much, is so fascinated by the grandeur and the love- 
liness of this one, that he takes the risk and sacrifices 
many a smaller thing that he may lay hold of this one 
great thing that makes the world beautiful for him. 

The Kingdom of God is not a lucky find — the King- 
dom of God is the reward of diligent search. The 
Kingdom of God is a challenge to speculative faith, an 
appeal to heroism, an appeal to constructive ability; it 



THE ONE THING 163 

is the laying out of life in a solemn conviction; it is a 
test everywhere ; it is. a battle all the time. 

The Kingdom of God is like my pulpit. I must oc- 
cupy it if I can as if we were all children of God, as 
if the supreme thing were to bring one another so far 
as possible into relation with God. If the day ever 
comes when that seems impossible, if the day ever 
comes when conscience leads one way and interest 
another, the Kingdom of God may seem like a pearl 
of great price, and a man, if he be true, must sell all 
he has to keep his pearl. 

.The Kingdom of God is like your business. Ah, 
but you say, "You do not know what business is like 
these days, with its keen competition, its unscrupulous 
buying and selling, its breaking of contracts, and its 
ruthle'ss disregard of mere philanthropy, — you do not 
know what business is like." Yes I do, but that is 
where the test comes in. It may be you started in 
your business career with very high ideals, but when 
you faced facts and the pressure of things came down 
upon you, you surrendered your ideal and said, "I 
must do as other men do/' and now the Kingdom to 
you is a vague memory of bygone hopes. In short, you 
failed. You should have sold all that you had to be 
true to the Kingdom; not recklessly, but even in the 
days when you were swept away by the power of the 
system, you should have battled to recover your feet. 
Even in the days when you went wrong and it seemed 
as if you could not help it, you should not have suc- 
cumbed, you should have struggled back, for business 
itself is only possible in the long run by virtue of the 
principles of the Kingdom of God. If you let go 



164 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

jour moral restraint, you are only doing what if every- 
body else did would soon result in having no business 
to do at all. 

The Kingdom of God is no cheap, easy thing; Jesus 
never said so; what He said was, "It is here, and if 
men are brave enough, patient enough, persistent 
enough, loyal enough, they can enter into it." 

H. G. Wells, in his "Outline of History," says of 
Napoleon Bonaparte : — 

"His fascination lies in his sheer unscrupulousness. 
He was a record — a record plunger. He was as few 
men are, or dare to be, a scoundrel, bright and com- 
plete. He had no religion; no moral conflict ever dis- 
turbed him; and this self-conceit and fundamental athe- 
ism made him at least magnificently direct. What we 
want to do secretly more or less, he did in the daylight. 
Directness was his distinctive and immortalising qual- 
ity. In all history, there is no figure so completely anti- 
thetical to the figure of Jesus of Nazareth, whose 
pitiless and difficult doctrine of self-abandonment and 
self -forget fulness we can neither disregard nor yet 
bring ourselves to obey. In that antithesis lies the es- 
sential historical importance of Napoleon." 

I do not want to create in your minds a discussion 
concerning Napoleon, but we all know something of 
that spirit, the spirit that must have directness. There 
is the man who in his business would like to act accord- 
ing to the ethics of Christ, but there is one thing he 
wants still more, and that is wealth; he puts that first 
and misses the other. We would all like the principles 
of Christ brought into our national concerns. We 
have nearly wrecked the world with the other thing, 



THE ONE THING 165 

and we are trying to feel our way back, but we like 
directness, and we say, "We must have our safe- 
guards." 

* 'Britannia must rule the waves." 

* 'Germany must be over all." 

"France must be secure against her ancient enemy, 
and have her natural frontiers." 

"Russia must find her way to the sea." 

"America must safeguard her Monroe Doctrine." 

Yes, and we go the way of directness until we strike 
the rocks. Maybe, if we sought first the Kingdom of 
God, all these things would be added to us. Maybe, 
if Germany had sought first the Kingdom, her genius 
for organisation might have given her a legitimate su- 
premacy. She tried to gain it by the sword and lost. 
Maybe, if France would go the way of the Kingdom of 
God, she would cease to have an ancient enemy and 
find instead a neighbour. Maybe, if Britain would go 
the way of the Kingdom of God, she would be su- 
preme upon the seas by reason of her native talent for 
seamanship, and would not need to keep it so much 
by the power of her blatant cannon. Maybe, if America 
would take her share more fully in human service, she 
would find her security not in the separating sea, but 
in the uniting force of brotherhood. 

Maybe the way of the Kingdom of God is the right 
way after all. Maybe we have not organised suffi- 
ciently our capacity for right ; maybe we never explain 
our reasons, but we put second things first, until the 
world becomes a torn thing, and we say at last, "We 
cannot reconcile the Kingdom of God with the things 



166 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

we hold to be necessary." I know! That simply 
means we are not big enough, or intelligent enough 
yet, that is all. 

Jesus did not despise the untoward elements that 
were in His life. He had a traitor at His very board, 
who betrayed Him while he dipped his finger in the 
dish, but He did not hate the traitor, He took him as 
part of life. He had men all around Him who were 
thirsting for His blood, but He did not hate them ; He 
took them like the fisherman takes the bad fish with 
the good. *He saw the Cross looming up against the 
storm-swept sky, and He took it as part of the things 
that belong to the Kingdom, and had faith enough to 
believe that even with the Cross He could win through. 

He was not so unpractical as men think. The facts 
are with Him. He did build a Kingdom which has 
lasted longer than any other kingdom the world has 
ever seen. He has proved for us that the world is a 
Kingdom of God for those who will live it like its 
citizens. It is not mere idealism I am preaching: I 
have had enough bufletings and seen enough of life to 
know that you cannot talk the Kingdom into existence, 
but it makes all the difference in the world when a man 
sees that, in spite of everything, this world is athrill 
with the Divine Presence, and all that is wrong with 
it is that we are not clean enough, not brave enough, 
not patient enough, not constructive enough in the 
things of the Kingdom of God. It is a truth that 
once perceived, even amidst the storm, once grasped, 
even amidst the conflict, is like a pearl of great price. 
It is worth fighting for; it is worth holding on to; it 



THE ONE THING 167 

is worth selling all that you have to make it clear at 
last to your own soul, if not to anybody else, that the 
world is not a jungle full of wolves, but is God's world, 
full of His Spirit, and its basic thing after all is not 
hate, but Love. 



XV 

WANTED: LEADERS FOR THE CROWD 

TEXT: Matt. 9:35. But when he saw the multitudes he 
was moved with compassion for them, because they 
were distressed and scattered, as sheep not having a 
shepherd. . . . And he called unto him his twelve dis- 
ciples. 



J 



ESUS was the only man who ever saw sl multitude. 
It is not given to many to see, least of all to see a 
multitude. No man ever saw a multitude, unless he 
saw it timelessly and without reference to space. Who 
can truly see a multitude but Omniscience? To see 
a multitude you must look back before the beginning 
of the Creation, you must look on beyond the time when 
planets and stars shall dissolve. You must see men 
not only in the mass, you must see them as individuals. 
You must see down to the utmost possible depths of 
their degradation, you must see up to the utmost pos- 
sible heights of their glory. You must discern their 
motives, their hopes, their fears, their loves, their 
hates and the infinite complexity of their relationships. 

Few people see a multitude except in relation to 
some thought that is already in their mind. The 
King sees perhaps a multitude of subjects, the states- 
men a multitude of voters; the commercial man a mul- 
titude of potential customers, the military man a mul- 
titude of potential soldiers. The scientist sees, maybe, 

168 



WANTED: LEADERS FOR THE CROWD 169 

a mere agglomeration of units having a relation to 
some special theory that is in his mind, but no one 
can see a multitude truly except he is omniscient and 
also loves them for their own sakes. 

More than twenty years ago my predecessor, Dr. 
Parker, preaching from this text, said: — 

"Do not suppose that our Lord saw the multitude 
for the first time when He came down to earth; He 
came down to earth because He had already seen the 
multitude." 

That is an expression which was more readily ac- 
ceptable twenty years ago than now. We have put 
the emphasis upon the humanity of Jesus in our time, 
and one of our great difficulties is to perceive the im- 
portance and the reality of Jesus over the vista of the 
centuries. To us sometimes He seems a figure that is 
growing indistinct with the passing of time. The land 
in which He lived is a microscopic portion of land in 
comparison with the world as we see it to-day. The 
cities and villages in which He preached would scarcely 
be made noticeable by dots upon our map, and one of 
our difficulties is to bridge the centuries and perceive 
that Jesus is not really smaller because- His figure is 
far away, nor is Palestine necessarily less important 
because geographically it is microscopic. 

The marvel of Jesus is His insight. He saw not 
kinds of men, He saw MAN. He needed not that 
any should tell Him concerning man, for He Him- 
self knew what was in man. It is the quality of His 
insight that has kept Him in the centre of humanity 
through the changing centuries. It is perfectly true 



170 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

that the place where He lived was a very circumscribed 
place. His feet never carried Him outside the bound- 
aries of Palestine, but even so, He saw men not local- 
ised, but universalised, He saw MAN. 

Space is almost nothing, spirit is everything. Every 
little city in Palestine in the days of our Lord was a 
walled city remote from every other city. Jerusalem 
was one city, Jericho was another, and the way be- 
tween was perilous and infested with robbers. Every 
little village was isolated and set apart from the neigh- 
bouring villages, walled around, not with earth or 
stone, but with prejudice and convention. 

"Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?" said 
Nathanael, who lived in Cana of Galilee, which was in 
the same district. The mountains of Samaria stood in 
lonely isolation and armed hostility over against the 
mountains of Jerusalem, and bore witness to their 
mutual separation. 

"Dog of a Samaritan, ,, hissed the Jew between his 
teeth : "Dog of a Jew," answered the Samaritan in 
his heart. 

For Jesus to pass through the cities and the villages 
of that tiny land, refusing to see these surface differ- 
ences, preaching the one Gospel of the Kingdom, was 
every bit as great as if a man of our time were to 
cover the whole globe and pass through the barriers 
that separate races. Let us not speak of the narrow- 
ness of Jesus' environment until we are sure we have 
caught the catholicity of His Spirit. There are still 
men who cannot see over the walls of prejudice. There 
are those who see no multitude outside the circle of 
their own family. There are those who cannot see 



WANTED: LEADERS FOR THE CROWD 171 

over the barriers of class, and there are little patriots 
who have no cognisance of the peoples who live be- 
yond their national frontiers. It would revolutionise 
the world this very day if men could see man as MAN. 
There is not one person in 100,000 who can get be- 
neath the surface and discern the unity beneath 
the differences. Germany is not occupied by Ger- 
mans; it is occupied by men, women and children. 
It is not Russians who are dying in their multitudes of 
starvation; it is men, women and children. It is not 
Armenians who are the off-scouring of Europe; it is 
men, women and children. It would revolutionise the 
world in a single generation if we could capture the 
catholicity of spirit which distinguished the Master. 

Space is nothing, spirit is everything. He is not 
far away from us because He lived nineteen centuries 
ago. He is with us because His view of life is timeless. 
He is not remote and provincial because His feet rest 
in the little land of Palestine ; He is universal, because 
He saw men without reference to time or space, nay, 
He saw deeper still — He saw men as eternal spirits. 

The distinguishing thing about the gaze of the 
Master was its compassion. No man ever yet saw a 
crowd who did not feel its unutterable pity. "There 
must be an infinite pity," some one has said, "to cor- 
respond with the infinite pathos of life." We skim 
over the multitude, discerning only those points of con- 
tact which concern ourselves most closely. We have 
been blind to the multitude unless we have felt the 
stirrings of compassion. 

We may drop a tear or feel a momentary tremor 
of sentiment, but compassion is not sentiment; com- 



172 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

passion is redemption touched with pity. Jesus cap- 
tured the world because He drew to Himself its sor- 
row. No other appeal would have lasted through 
the centuries like that; it is the ground of our unity, 
after all. That is not necessarily a gloomy view. I 
hold that this little planet upon which we live is but a 
fragment of God's Universe. I hold that this mortal 
life we are passing through now is but a clause in the 
long tale of life. I hold that sorrow is a part of the 
music of creation. This is, maybe, a "planet of tears," 
but whatever existences lie beyond, they need tears, they 
need the hallowing of sorrow. There has been no 
great art, no great literature, no great music that has 
not been touched with the mystery of sorrow, there 
has been no true happiness that has not been blended 
with sorrow, there has been no exquisite beauty that 
has not been seen through the rainbow of tears. All 
great unities among men are the unities that are based 
upon compassion. The world is sick of the unities 
that come about by the manipulations of votes and 
the fluctuations of self-interest. There will never be 
unity among men until the bottom ground of it all 
shall be compassion. 

There is no true love between man and man or 
between man and woman if its bonds are only the 
bonds of admiration and mutual interest ; we have not 
begun to love until we have learned each other's limi- 
tations, and have been touched with compassion for 
one another's frailties. 

There is no true trade until the pathos of trade 
has come home to our hearts. If we only see the world 
as a potential market, its population as potential cus- 



WANTED: LEADERS FOR THE CROWD 173 

tomers, and do not see the pathos of the human need 
that brings them to us as customers, it is no wonder 
that we are only building upon the thin surface of life, 
and every now and again are appalled by the tragic 
depths that are beneath. 

Sorrow is, after all, God's principle of unity, it 
is the only thing which in the last resort holds the 
world together ; we are brought back to something like 
brotherhood and fellowship every now and again by 
pity and compassion. There is doubtless an existence 
beyond, where this will not be so, but even that ex- 
istence could not be what we hope except upon its 
threshold God shall wipe away all tears from men's 
eyes. The Heaven that was not entered through a 
mist of tears would not be Heaven. Let us trust 
God about the mystery of sorrow, and look more 
deeply than we have for its meaning in life. 

The sorrow of Jesus for the multitude was not a 
mere sentiment. He saw down to its cause, and this 
was what touched His great heart, that "men were 
fainting and scattered abroad as sheep having no 
shepherd." It was not the sickness of men, for they 
could be cured ; it was the aimlessness of men that was 
the supreme sorrow. It was not that they had no 
points of contact and fellowship, but that they huddled 
together like sheep in blind confidence, and scattered 
again like frightened sheep in moments of equally 
blind distrust. It was the aimlessness of their lives 
that touched His great heart. The Master was going 
abroad with a great all-comprehensive message of the 
Kingdom. He was trying to give men a motive for 
living, an objective to seek. Men were not deliberately 



174 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

bad so much as that they had no objective ; they were 
like sheep huddled together or scattering they scarcely 
knew why. We have not seen very deeply into life 
unless we have perceived that this aimlessness is its 
real burden for many people, the constant necessity of 
dealing with things that come to them every day, 
the pressure of the crowd, the pressure of need, the 
necessity of the daily task for the earning of bread, 
the constant call to engage in great social or national 
combinations, yet all the time no clear vision of the 
meaning of life and the objective to be sought. 

That is the pathos of life. You can herd men to- 
gether so easily for wrong purposes, albeit you can see 
in the midst of their strivings the glory and the 
grandeur, the magnificent heroism, the splendid power 
so often wasted on objectives that are not worthy. 
That is the abiding pathos of things ! There is noth- 
ing that can cure that perennial sorrow except the 
discovery of a true purpose in life. Wealth will not 
cure it. No man, perhaps, is more miserable than the 
monied man with no direct aim in life. Success will 
not cure it. No elevation amongst men will bring 
satisfaction if, as he stands upon his eminence, the 
man knows he has lost his way. 

It is the function of true religion to give men 
true objectives in life ; if we have not done that, that is 
the real tragedy. There is all manner of capacity 
for the good and the noble in men if only they see 
clearly what it is they have to seek. Jesus came to 
give men just that perception of life's meaning. He 
lifted it to a high and noble altitude, made it to tran- 
scend the mere limitations of mortal life, to go deeper 



WANTED: LEADERS FOR THE CROWD 175 

than the mere surface fluctuations of success or fail- 
ure, happiness or sorrow. He came to give men a 
sense of a deep fellowship with the great Eternal, of 
Son-ship with Him which should make life acceptable 
to them in all its many shades of difference. 

When He perceived the pathos of the fact that the 
multitude were like sheep having no shepherd, was it 
not natural that He should turn to find leaders for the 
people, and that out of His compassion came the call- 
ing of the Twelve ? 

After all there is a place in life for a spiritual 
aristocracy. There are shepherds as well as sheep, 
there are leaders as well as followers, and the supreme 
need of men, taken as a multitude, is that of true 
leadership, the leadership that will be swayed with 
compassion. So often leadership is not swayed by 
that at all. Military leadership may be swayed by 
desire for victory. Napoleon said, — "What are a mil- 
lion men to a man like me?" The thing that made 
that genius, who was fitted to be a great leader of 
men, a curse at last was the absence of compassion. He 
saw great objectives, but he was not touched with the 
pity of it all. 

The politician may see men in relation to their votes ; 
he wants to sweep their suffrages in a certain direction ; 
he may have become insensible to their sufferings. It 
is the absence of the spirit of compassion that makes 
much of that kind of leadership a curse instead of a 
blessing. 

The Press-man may see men in relation to the cir- 
culation of the paper he represents, and the pathos of 



176 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

the multitude's appeal for news and guidance may fade 
away out of his heart. 

The preacher may see men merely as a congregation, 
seeking to sweep them with him as a multitude, but if 
he loses the sense of the infinite pity of it all he will 
become possibly a curse rather than a blessing. 

The true leadership that feels the pity of the mul- 
titude and seeks to give true guidance to one's fellows, 
is the aristocratic gift of God. It means, of course, 
that it should be received early in life, and not late. 
What man among you young men will put himself 
into the Christ's school, that he may be fitted, trained, 
made ready for Christ's leadership? You cannot begin 
too soon. If that is your objective it does not only 
mean that you should give yourself up to some special 
calling which we call sacred. Men are wanted in the 
market-place, in the forum and the Factory, quite as 
much as they are wanted in the pulpit. The object of 
the pulpit is to create an atmosphere for the Factory 
and the Forum. It is there perhaps that the real work 
has to be done. Commercial life translated into terms 
of Christian leadership, political life all athrob with 
Christian purposes. These are the world's crying 
needs, and to them in a sense the pulpit is subsidiary 
because it is the root out of which that type of man 
grows, yet transcendent because it may bring down 
from the spiritual realm the forces that will help to 
accomplish these things in the world. 

I see that men have got to discussing again the 
rites of ordination, and that some people have been 
attacking our friend Dr. Orchard because he has 
sought some new form of ordination. Let him alone I 



WANTED: LEADERS FOR THE CROWD 177 

He is preaching Christ's Gospel in this city as few 
men are preaching it, preaching with power and effec- 
tiveness. His point of view is perfectly consistent. 
His great objective is the union of the Churches, and 
he holds that men should go as far as possible without 
the sacrifice of principle in order to achieve it. If he 
chooses to have his ministry made valid in the Epis- 
copalian and Presbyterian as well as in Congregational 
form, let him alone, and God bless him! The world 
is not dying because it is not getting the right type 
of ordination, but because not enough people have re- 
ceived the ordination of the Christ. From my point 
of view, while I seek the same objective, I put little 
stress upon priestly ordination, it is the ordination 
of the Pierced Hand that matters, it is what the old 
Quakers used to call the ' 'constraint laid upon them, 
the sense of a Divine calling, the feeling that one has 
been 'moved' of God. I do not know any man, Pope, 
Prelate or Priest, who can give that to another or add 
to it when once it is given. What I am longing for is 
a greater company of the ordained, not a restricted 
select circle of men regarded as Christ's special serv- 
ants, but a broadening circle of men and women who 
will go out into all the many avenues of life and en- 
gage in all its many tasks, holding their vocation as a 
sacred trust, seeking to give guidance to their fellow- 
men, and the leadership that brings mankind into the 
Kingdom of God. 

I really do not care to distinguish which is the 
most important in this world, the minister or the 
merchant, the statesman or the pressman. It is not 
the locality where we spend our life or the manner 



178 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

of the things with which we deal; it is the spirit in 
which we deal with them that matters. 

There is a clamant call, and I pray that it may; 
come to some of you this morning for the yielding 
of yourselves as pupils of the Christ, that you may 
catch His vision of the solidarity of mankind, feel 
at your heart the throb of His compassion for the 
sorrows of mankind, and whether in pulpit or street, 
forum or market-place, seek to give leadership to 
your fellows to bring them into the Kingdom of God. 



XVI 

"LAST OF ALL" 

TEXT: Mark 12:6. He had yet one, a beloved Son; he 
sent him last unto them saying, They will reverence my 
Son. 

IT is the glory of Jesus Christ that He is last of 
all. It is only he who is last who is worthy of 
worship; it was His own word, spoken often, "the last 
shall be first and the first shall be last." There have 
been many firsts and the ages have rolled over them 
and left them behind indistinguishably. The ages will 
never roll over Jesus the Christ for He is last of all. 
He drives the ages before Him like a flock of sheep 
and when He has driven them into the fold at the con- 
summation of the Divine purposes He will close the 
door with the triumphant proclamation, "I am the last 
of all!" 

When Jesus spoke these words, He was thinking 
of course of that long line of prophets which had pre- 
ceded Him. In all the great developments of history, 
there is always the man and the time for the man. He 
knew Himself to be the Man, He felt within Him- 
self that they who had preceded Him had but fore- 
shadowed Him, prepared the way for Him. He did 
not look down upon them, He had fellowship with 
them, but He knew that He had come from an interior- 
ness in God to which they were strangers. He did 

179 



180 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

not hesitate to move in advance of their teaching, — 
He felt within Himself that He had brought* the line 
to a close. He was the last of all ! 

He could not but be conscious also of the fact 
that the hour had come. It is indeed one of the 
marvels of history to see the concentration of forces 
that beat upon the hour when Jesus came. He'had to 
come, — the hour was ready for Him. There are no 
greater tragedies in history than those of the man who 
comes before the hour has struck, or the man who 
comes after the hour has passed. The hour was 
waiting when Jesus came, the people had been pre- 
pared, prepared through a long history and through 
a severe training to carry forward the message of 
the evangel. The Roman Empire had unconsciously 
prepared the world for the King of God. 

A language had been prepared; the Greek tongue 
had spread over all the earth. Every Jew might speak 
with a Hebrew accent, every Roman who mixed in 
public affairs knew at least the Latin phrases, but the 
Greek tongue was the speech of every man from Jeru- 
salem to Rome. The language was ready for the mes- 
sage that Jesus had brought, and there was also desire. 
It seemed as if everywhere there had been a break- 
down, a breakdown in life, a breakdown in philo- 
sophy. Even in the realm of Jewish religion the law of 
Moses had ceased to satisfy the best souls. The hour 
had come and the Man had come and Jesus knew within 
Himself that he was the last of all. 

Yet the consciousness of that did not blind Him to 
the reception He would receive. He saw quite clearly 
that the Cross would be His portion. He knew that 



"LAST OF ALL" 181 

reverence does not always bow the knee and worship, 
it may be swayed by some meaner motive and become 
all the more determined in its hostility, more bitter in 
its anger and He saw quite clearly that, Man of the 
ages though He was, coming in the hour of the ages 
though He did, He would be cast out and would be 
Last of All. They were determined to make Him so, 
they resolved to slay Him; as if that was not enough 
they determined to crucify Him between two thieves; 
they would make Him in the midst of the people as 
the "last of all." He accepted the position, accepted 
it because of His faith in God and in the ages. He 
knew within himself that the Cross would be the 
talisman of His power, knew that at long last the 
symbol of shame would be the symbol of glory. He 
accepted with resignation and even with joy the last 
degradation that men could put upon Him, knowing 
that last of all He would win His kingdom even 
through His shame. He had said to them: — "When 
the Lord therefore of the vineyard cometh, what will 
he do unto those husbandmen?" and they said, judging 
themselves out of their own mouths : — "He will mis- 
erably destroy those wicked men and will let out his 
vineyard unto other husbandmen, which shall render 
him the fruits in their seasons." 

It was no doubt that idea that possessed the minds 
of His own disciples. They believed that Jesus would 
come again and come again soon, that the tragedy of 
the Cross would soon be obliterated in the glory of 
His return. You cannot turn the pages of the New 
Testament without discovering that this hope of the 
immediate return of the Christ was one of the great 



182 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

springs of their activity. "The Judge standeth at the 
door/' cries James. "The night is far spent, the day 
is at hand," says Paul. "Ye are in heaviness for a 
little while," says Peter, "waiting for the appearing of 
the Lord." 

Everywhere you turn through the literature of the 
New Testament you find that the disciples of Jesus 
had much the same thought in their minds as those 
Pharisees had expressed. The Christ was to them the 
sure precursor of God's early judgment; the Christ 
would come again and close the ages, He would be the 
last of all. Already before the New Testament closes 
you discover how men are becoming distressed in mind 
because of the delay in this great consummation. 
When you read the Epistle to the Thessalonians you 
see how they were distressed because some of the 
believing folk were dropping one by one into the grave 
and they were afraid that they would thus miss par- 
ticipation in Christ's glory. Part of Paul's reason 
for writing that letter was to assure them that the 
early death of these believing folk would not rob them 
of their participation in the triumph of Christ which 
would close the ages. 

Later, in this second Epistle of Peter you hear the 
voice of the mocker saying, — "Where is the promise 
of His coming? For from the day when the fathers 
fell asleep all things continue as they were from the 
beginning of the creation." 

And yet, through the times that followed the New 
Testament you discover this hope of the early closing 
of the age is dominant in the mind of Christian 
people. You find it in the writing of Tertullian and 



"LAST OF ALL" 183 

Irenaeus and Hypolitus. It is Augustine and the Greek 
fathers who followed him who seem to have struck 
a new note. Augustine began to interpret things dif- 
ferently. He said, He will not come soon, He will 
come at the close of the age — there will be a slow, 
steady growth of the Kingdom of God, there will at 
last be the Millennium and then He will come and 
be Last of All. Augustine interpreted the "coming" 
of Christ as taking place at the death of the faithful. 
He said, He will come back visibly to set up His 
Kingdom on earth, He will come in an hour when you 
think not, like a thief in the night. 

These were days when Christian folk began to be 
otherworldly. They said the glory of Christ was to 
be revealed in a world other than this. Those were 
days when tremendous emphasis was put upon the 
brevity of life and the certainty of death, when men 
lived under the shadow of the impending launching 
into eternity. Slowly there came the inevitable corrup- 
tion, slowly there took place the growth of priest-craft 
and ecclesiastical profession of great powers by which 
men would be prepared for the world that was to come, 
the emphasising of great mystic ordinances and sacra- 
ments which were believed to have tremendous power. 
Men began to think of the rites of the Church or of 
the solemnity of Christian Baptism or of Extreme 
Unction as preparing them for that great Kingdom of 
Christ which was to be Last of All. The echoes of it 
were heard in Protestant Evangelism; they have not 
quite died away even in our time. Many of us re- 
member when Christ's salvation was spoken of as 
having reference to the world beyond rather than to 



184 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

this present world. Men juggled with their chances 
of life and death, and thought that even if sin had 
swayed your life, so long as you made profession of 
faith in Christ at the eleventh hour, you would be 
safe for the life that was yet to be. Always it seemed 
as if some inevitable power was pushing back the sway 
of Christ to the background, where He was to be 
Last of All. 

Then God touched his servant Copernicus and 
said to him in his heart, "Tell them how much bigger 
the world is than they dream" ; He touched His ser- 
vant Galileo and said, "Get your glasses and let them 
see how vast is the world beyond them, shake their 
faith in their theories, disturb their confidence in the 
realm that is hidden in the shadows and throw back 
their attention upon the world that is around them. ,, 
And so it came to pass that the emphasis was shifted 
from the great hereafter to the present and during 
these last hundred years or so the emphasis on the 
personality of Christ has been upon His manhood 
rather than upon His Deity. He who in a reign of 
mere theology had become a kind of frame upon which 
dogmas were hung was now brought out of the shad- 
ows and the light of enquiry was thrown upon His 
manhood. We have been living through a time when 
the manhood of Christ has challenged all men, not 
always with reverent pen, sometimes with unbelieving 
pen, but never in all the history of the centuries has 
there been a time when so much fierce light has been 
focussed upon the person of Jesus of Nazareth. In 
our time and even in the time of our immediate 
fathers has the Christ been emerging with new glory, 



"LAST OF ALL" 185 

and men see Him not only as Deity but as the climax 
of manhood — as the ideal man. It has been a good 
and great vision; the Christ has been appealing to 
the hearts of men during this last century with a new 
impingement, with a new emphasis, but He has still 
maintained His place as the Last of All. 

Men have been searching back into the origins of 
things, far away through the mists of antiquity, by the 
flickering lamp of geology, by the torch of biology, 
but the farther they have penetrated the more in- 
significant has seemed the point they have reached in 
their search for the beginning of things, the more 
luminous and challenging and splendid has been the 
figure of the Christ which seems to stand at the other 
end of the evolutionary process, challenging men to 
say whether this was not the goal towards which man 
was marching. 

When men turn the lamp upon His earthly life 
they begin to feel that the Christian life as believers 
should live it is a life that is concerned with the pres- 
ent world rather than the world that is beyond. There 
has been a deeper challenge to personal character in 
our time than ever before and more men and women 
have been seeking to live the Christ life amidst the 
material things of the world than ever before. 

And then they have been forced to look upon the 
social conditions of the world, for there have been 
forces at work in our midst which have been making 
it more and more impossible to conceive of religion 
as a purely personal thing — we have been reaching out 
for a Christian solution of great corporate concerns. 
The more we have looked into these things the more 



186 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

we have seen that Christ's place is not in the leader- 
ship of the van but Last of All. We have said, "Oh, 
yes, the Christian state is the ideal state, but it is not 
possible now. We say we cannot do our business in 
the light of the Christian ideal, we cannot manage 
our national affairs in the light of the Christian ideal." 
We do not reject the Christ, but we put Him last of 
all. And still the Providence of God has pursued us 
and will not let us rest, but is driving us back to the 
conclusion that we cannot get these things right until 
we get them right in the light of Christ. No man ever 
thought of settling them in the beginning in the light 
of Christ's teaching, in the power of His spirit. 
Strange it is to look back along the line of social 
reform and remember the days of Frederick Maurice, 
Kingsley and Ludlow who began to preach Christian 
Socialism in this city of London. In those days they 
were regarded as heterodox and extremists, but they 
held aloft the torch and fought valiantly for the truth 
as they saw it. The working men themselves did not 
accept the Christ, they turned away from Him to 
Karl Marx. Capitalism also thrust Christ back into 
the last place of all. 

But He is behind the ages and the ultimate question 
is just that, — Is He last? He never could be first 
in this old world. When men accept the truth and 
the truth becomes dominant corruptions begin to gather 
round it, the battle for truth is an ever-recurring battle. 
No system holds its place through the ages, no teach- 
ing maintains the allegiance of the multitude through 
the ages. It is always night before it is dawn, there is 
always battle before there is Peace. 



"LAST OF ALL" 187 

I do not know how any one can believe in the salva- 
tion of the world in toto ; it is not in accordance with 
the conditions of our human life. As soon as we 
have won one victory another battle issues out of the 
midst of it. Each generation has its problem to solve. 
The ultimate question is, Is the Christ the last of all? 
Does He gather in each epoch, does He shepherd home 
each age? There has to be a fitness of the solution 
to the condition in which men are found. God's whole 
University cannot be comprised in the kindergarten of 
any generation. The fight for the Kingdom of God is 
a ceaseless fight. It does not grow simpler, but grander, 
it does not grow less intense, but broader in its sweep. 
So long as men live on this earth there will be the 
challenge to Christian discipleship and the ultimate 
question will be, Is He the ultimate One ? 

The marvel of the Christian faith is that nineteen 
hundred years ago He was set down in the dim dawn 
of things and has not been dislodged. When Jesus 
said of Himself that He had come last of all, He did 
not mean that He had brought the ages to a close, 
blocked the road to progress. He came not to close 
the age, but to inspire a new age. He said there 
would come others after Him and some would be evil, 
but He said also that His disciples would in some 
senses transcend Him. He said, — "He that believethi 
in me the works that I do shall he do also and greater 
works than these shall he do because I go unto the 
Father." 

He did not want that the ages should forever be 
slavishly bowed at His feet, with their backs to the 



188 THE CROSS AND THE GARDEN 

coming day and their faces to the past, He wanted 
men to go out with the light of the morning in their 
faces. He promised to be with them; He promised 
to endow them with power and supply them with 
wisdom. He knew that the scale of life would broaden, 
that man's restless mind would make discoveries of 
science, industry, travel, inter-communication. It was 
a great throbbing world already opening out in ever 
widening vistas when Jesus died, and He wanted His 
disciples to go out boldly and face the coming ages. 
He said, I will be with you, "Lo I am with you all 
the days, even unto the end." 

It is only in this way that the Christian life is toler- 
able; it is in this way that Christianity makes its ap- 
peal to the heroism of men. There is no progress for 
those whose faces are always turned backward; there 
is no joy for those who dare not face the future. The 
ultimate question is the question whether the Christ 
shall be the last of all. The way of salvation is the 
acceptance of the Christ as the expression of God's 
will and the yielding of ourselves to Him in His great 
purpose of bringing in the Kingdom of God. He 
must reign because the throne He occupies is peculiar 
to Him. There is no one to take His place ; there 
is no one to mount the steps of that throne. He is last 
in the uniqueness of His personality, He is last in 
His relationship to God; He is last in the majesty of 
His message, He is last in the mystery of His Cross, 
He is last in the power of His spirit, but He is not 
final in His mere earthly form. He is with men as 
their dynamic and as their inspiration. "He must 



"LAST OF ALL" 189 

reign till He hath put all enemies under His feet," and 
when all things are subjected to Him, then shall the 
Son also be subject unto Him who sent Him that God 
may be all in alL 



THE END 



